The Man With a Cloak (1951)

The Cotten season advances without strain, and presents a courteous offering that leaves few untouched.

The Man With a Cloak (1951) is a talky and confined gloomy New York gothic mansion genre-less melodrama Poe-posturing old New York style historical murder, deception and drunken curmudgeon paranoid girl poetic justice and wicked housekeeper style twist and turning film noir yarn which plays a special riff with classic literary gothic Americana, and which stars Barbara Stanwyck and Joseph Cotten, wow, and is Poe-infested raven wavin bed-ridden dying uncle of fortune and handsome literary low lifes at the bar and on the streets, with Leslie Caron, Louis Calhern, Jim Backus, and Margaret Wycherly.

A Dangerous Profession (1949)

A Dangerous Profession (1949) is a stylised pulp cop versus bail-bondsman versus client stand-off romance crime and detective mystery mannered film noir directed by Ted Tetzlaff, and starring Ella Raines, George Raft, Jim Backus and Pat O'Brien.

The tough loners of film noir are always waiting for a new case in the city of crime, whether they be detective or heel, or in this case a bail bondsman, something of the perfect cinematic loner. 

Some of them are waiting for the return of the woman that burned them, and George Raft plays both, with his usual stillness and impassive stone hard cinematic stare.

In the game of sucker moves, this loner works his broken relationships with broken noir charm, the grimaces of both his current partner and his former police partner testify to this.

Don't Bother To Knock (1952)

Don't Bother To Knock (1952) is a psychological character study thriller film noir starring Anne Bancroft, Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe and directed by Roy Ward Baker. 

The screenplay was written by Daniel Taradash, based on the 1951 novel Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong. 

In the picture, Monroe plays a blinder as a disturbed babysitter watching a child at the same New York hotel where a pilot, played by Widmark, is staying. 

He starts flirting with her, but over the evening her strange behaviour makes him increasingly aware that she is most mentally disturbed indeed. 

Marilyn Monroe's better known for any number of reasons, but often these reasons are not acting. Here she plays Rose Loomis, she’s got scars on her wrists, a past as murky as the Hudson River, and a penchant for trouble. Rose is the niece of the hotel’s elevator man, a guy who knows more about the guests than the bellhops know about their tips.

Hollywood Story (1951)

Hollywood Story (1951) is a motion picture industry noir killer thriller historic Hollywood mystery drama starring Richard Conte and Julie Adams, Richard Egan, Henry Hull, Fred Clark and Jim Backus, a high host of noir talent.

The murder in Hollywood trope usually takes a film noir twist and usually with a bit of fun. If it ain't In a Lonely Place it will be elsewhere.

Directed by William Castle, Hollywood Story (1951) takes us on a captivating journey through the glitz and shadows of old Hollywood. In a kind of film noir style, with curiosity and nostalgic tableau. Starring Richard Conte and Julie Adams, this American mystery film weaves a tale of ambition, murder, and intrigue.

M (1951)

M (1951) is remake of Fritz Lang's 1931 classic of the same name, and does not disappoint as it condenses and updates the drama, taking it to the streets of Los Angeles, and offering up some great visuals of the Victorian area of Bunker Hill.

A significant amount had happened in the world and in cinema in the twenty years between the two films, and while the story is in essence exactly the same, the two worlds, that of Berlin in 1931 and Los Angeles in 1951, have little in common.

While Fritz Lang presented public and personal paranoia to the max in his 1931 masterpiece, neither are edged deep into the drama of the 1951 M, but it is otherwise an effective film.

There are stabs at public paranoia and criminal psychology, although both seem to be token efforts at times. The police procedural which returns an otherwise constantly roving camera to the quite corner of a soundstage on a fairly regular basis, is handled by Howard Da Silva, who plays the carefree cop, chewing his way from meeting to meeting, first with the city's mayor, and then with various psychologists, colleagues and villains.