Circle of Danger (1951)

The Ray Milland Season Unfolds Without Haste

Circle of Danger (1951) is an American in Britain post-WW2 investigative mystery Limey home nations road movie of mystery with locale-driven shooting in London, Wales and in the Highlands, making a virtue of Patricia Roc's infectious smile and Ray Milland's hatted and haunted pillar to post look as he uncovers a vaguely understandable plot that I am not sure now after two viewings — has ever been explained. 

The circle itself, the circle of danger, the rotunda of peril, is specifically not quite as convoluted as it might otherwise be in a film noir. 

Jamaica Inn (1939)

Jamaica Inn (1939) is an Alfred Hitchcock Daphne Du Maurier historical wrecker and robber grog-swilling smuggler undercover cop old dark house family tragedy and at times pleasantly ham-laden melodrama, which also doubles as Alfred Hitchcock's last British film and the last feature film the great director made which did not feature one of his directorial cameos within it.

Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre is rife with complex and often tyrannical parental figures. This recurring motif not only shapes his narratives but also deepens the psychological tension in his films. 

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Foreign Correspondent (1940) is an early American period Alfred Hitchcock wartime journalism and media political adventure anti-Nazi propaganda espionage romance thriller chase and assumed identity movie, not in any sufficiency of the term as film noir, but most importantly a spy noir, and an espionage adventure, made noir almost with the advent of the twentieth century's best known bad types, the Nazis. 

Made in, for and about a morbid and bellicose hiatus period before the United States entered Word War II and when World War II had no name and is referred to as 'a general war', when Germany has invaded Poland but Russia is still in Alliance with Germany and Britain is at war of a sudden, while Holland is Nazified and occupied and makes up most of the set piece glory, most famously some windmill scene and scenery, amounting to some of the best and if not the best windmill film of the century.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945)

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) is a jealous invalid-sister paranoid woman small town family murder plot movie which takes the film noir style and its themes off of the city streets and into the middle class homes of a dull New Hampshire mill town.

Historical classical and purest high period Golden Age film noir does have a slight craze for mid century small town mill-centred drama. There are more than a few mill-town noirs. Among The Living (1941) is a classic mill-town noir, as is the amazing Bette Davis noir Beyond The Forest (1949). Purely classic mill town film noir

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) and any article about it, or discussion of its noir propensities must always come with an extra spoiler warning, extra to the universal spoiler warning of this website, and your every day moment of film exploration will be shattered if you have not seen this film noir and continue reading this.

They Won't Believe Me (1947)

They Won't Believe Me (1947) is a note-perfect melodramatic film noir from the later 1940s.

Within the paranoid marriages of the era, there was according to the classic film noir canon, a good deal of secrecy, murder, and madness. 

Given the amount of times that film noir discusses such marriages, and their eerie contents, one wonders what was happening to men and women in that decade.

It is perhaps as if the women were coming out of the darkness and forging a place for themselves in the future homes and relationships of the 1950s, and beyond. In the 1940s marriages were fearful and secret places, where women remained prisoners in mysterious gilded cages.

Ride The Pink Horse (1947)

Ride the Pink Horse is a one of a kind film noir, starring and directed by Robert Montgomery, who had got the hang of the medium enough to jam out this hard 1947 thriller.

Ride the Pink Horse is a jam, in its capacity to mix and ferment and develop a few new tropes. Film noir not only comes back from World War Two here, but it goes south towards the border, and finds itself down New Mexico way. 

Revenge, blackmail, innocence, experience and cultures clash, and all with an almost unique new flavour, as Robert Montgomery's ambitious direction pays off.

The walking California Redwood style performance from Robert Montgomery suits the dream-like quality of the environment his character Lucky Gagin enters. Luck is in fact a theme, as it always is with crime, and other games of chance.

As in its best, film noir is a dream, or presents its dilemmas and encounters in as much dream language as can be mustered. The carousel with the pink horse in Ride The Pink Horse is one example of many. 

Nocturne (1946)

Nocturne (1946) is a full-on film noir moody mystery melodrama, produced by long-time Alfred Hitchcock associate Joan Harrison. 

Within the excellent opening photography, we witness rakish Hollywood composer (Edward Ashley) dropping dead in his swanky Hollywood house.

The film noir police force think it's a straight up suicide, but maverick lieutenant hero Joe Warne (played by George Raft) suspects murder.

With no hanging about, Warne discovers that this Hollywood composer has broken the hearts of at least ten women in recent years, offering motive for murder aplenty.

The main suspect is Frances Ransom (played by Lynn Bari), who may or may not have been avenging her sister, the nightclub thrush Carol Page (Virginia Huston). 

Pursuing the case with enough firm diligence to get him at one stage thrown off the police force, determined copper Joe Warne of course refuses to give up.

There is a hint here of a sub-genre that would become larger by far as the years passed, the dark side of Hollywood as film noir, which remained popular as much among the community itself, as it was with the theatre-visiting public. Hollywood loves to film itself, murdering itself. In that glorious, glamourous heart, there is always a corrupting influence to be found.