Hold Back Tomorrow (1955)

Hold Back Tomorrow (1955) is a serious but strange outré death row doomed couple fantasy film noir about two lost romantic souls converging in the darkest of circumstances.

In a dramatic move so odd it could only materialise in the liberally weird machination fantasies of the Hollywood machine in the death-of-film-noir period, which ranges across the five years between 1955 and 1960, a condemned man is offered the chance to have whatever he so desires, under the law, offering a crazed film premise that only a bluff and wild film noir producer in the 1950s could never refuse.

Shield For Murder (1954)

Shield For Murder (1954) is a violent crooked cop bad-lieutenant style savagely enjoyable classic spaghetti cellar film noir starring a heaving Edmond O'Brien as a mentalist officer with a bend on for the dark side.

It's the mid 1950s and all is roaring forward into a bright future, but on the streets of the noir city it's a different story, where one man is bending the American Dream outta shape with every slug, snog and gamble.

A beautiful and even darker twin to the other great bent and copper movie of the moment which was Pushover (1954), with Fred MacMurray and Kim Novak. It's not debatable whether or not you want the cop to get the money and the woman. 

In the brooding corridors of urban noir, Shield for Murder, a collaborative directorial effort helmed by Edmond O'Brien and Howard Koch, thrusts audiences into the visceral underbelly of Los Angeles, where O'Brien's portrayal of a cop gone awry serves as a chilling harbinger of moral decay and nasty noir cop rage.

The Woman on Pier 13 (1949)

The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) is the ultimate anti-Communist paranoid thriller mash-up Red Scare classic film noir.

With a large cast and yet larger reputation for more back-room witch-hunting and Communist panic than any other movie in the film noir style, The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) tells of a powerful Communist cell in the docklands of San Francisco Bay.

As a blunt noir thematic descant The Woman on Pier 13 is also a fast-assed attack on any and all Hollywood radicals who defended their party membership on the grounds of a youthful indiscretion.

I Married a Communist must also be read as Hollywood’s version of its own internal politics. Someone got to the moguls and infected them with the idea that Communists had infiltrated and infected and otherwise corrupted showbusiness at every level from the theater door to the scripts and properties departments.

Tarantula (1955)

Tarantula (1955) is a Cold War red scare science fiction giant bug monster movie directed by Jack Arnold and starring John Agar, Mara Corday and Leo G. Carroll.

To be fair to it, there is less about the metaphorical possibilities of giant spiders in Tarantula (1955) than may be commonly imagined.

It's not exactly a nuclear threat movie, and nor in earnest is it a movie about any communist threat.

If anything Tarantula is a fable about our reliance on science to both get us into messes but also to fix those messes up.

Unlike virtually every other monster and giant monster film of the time, the monsters of Tarantula are born of a benign scientists goofy positive plan to create food for all mankind by simply enlarging domestic animals.