Singapore (1947)

Singapore (1947) is a romantic smuggler exotic amnesia noir with Fred MacMurray and Ava Gardner.

Directed by John Brahm Singapore is an enjoyable mix of movie exotica — the style which clichéd the best of the rest of the globe and brought it to Hollywood, minced it, encoded various messages concerning foreign policy and international relations — and presented it on the screen

Despite being a post-World War II drama set in Singapore, there isn't much that one can learn about the Fall of Singapore and the rebuilding of the island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia, which took place after 1945.

The Locket (1946)

The Locket (1946) is a noir of nested narratives — a kleptomaniac paranoid psychoanalytic flashback within a flashback film noir which unravels one woman's secret life and haunted past. 

This psychological thriller  directed by John Brahm stars Laraine Day, Brian Aherne, Robert Mitchum, and Gene Raymond, and was released by RKO Pictures. 

The film is based on a screenplay by Sheridan Gibney and adapted from "What Nancy Wanted" by Norma Barzman, wife of later-blacklisted writer Ben Barzman. 

The set up is an interrupted wedding, the stuff of nightmares. John Willis (Gene Raymond) is about to marry bride to be Nancy (Laraine Day), but a man named Harry Blair (Brian Aherne) crashes the wedding. 

Guest In The House (1944)

Guest in the House (1944) is a psychological film noir melodrama in which a young manipulative woman moves in with her fiancé's family and turns a happy household against itself.

Guest in the House — which was later re-released under the salacious, demeaning and slightly orgiastic title of Satan in Skirts — was directed by John Brahm and stars Anne Baxter and Ralph Bellamy, with support from Marie McDonald 

In this sensual and somewhat slow-burning domestic film noir fable, the character of Evelyn Heath (Anne Baxter) arrives in the home of the extended family of her smitten fiancé, Dan Proctor (played by Scott McKay) somewhere on the New England coast, hoping for a recuperative summer.

The scenery is reminiscent of many a woman's picture of the era, with high cliffs and crashing waves, the first being suggestive of suicide, and the later suggestive of emotional turmoil.

The Brasher Doubloon (1947)

The Brasher Doubloon (1947) is a typically complex Philip Marlowe family crime film noir mystery directed by John Brahm, starring George Montgomery and Nancy Guild, based on the 1942 novel The High Window by Raymond Chandler.

Although not the best loved nor even the best known of the period adaptations of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, The Brasher Doubloon (1947) does remain highly faithful to type in that it squeezes in the many well known and oft tread tropes, types and topics familiar to readers of that series.

Following the success of the Chandler adaptation Murder My Sweet (1944) and Chandler's adaptation of Double Indemnity (1944), the author became in fashion in Hollywood: Warners filmed The Big Sleep, MGM did The Lady in the Lake (1946), and Paramount filmed a Chandler original, The Blue Dahlia (1946). 

Hangover Square (1945)

Hangover Square (1945) is a classic historically-set amnesia film noir about madness, genius, weakness and manipulation, starring Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell and George Sanders.

Add to this some further elements of police psychology, the perils of artistic genius and a clash of class, and there emerges one of the best thrillers of the decade, albeit bizarre with facial pulls from Cregar, super-dramatic music from Bernard Herrmann, one of the cinema's greatest ever composers.

That and a whole host of Cockney side-fun, which serves to pull focus on the murderous madness which is at the centre of the action.

The Lodger (1944)

The 1944 film The Lodger, starring Merle Oberon, Laird Cregar and George Sanders, is a fine example of movie making splendour, ponderously piling suspicion upon suspicion in a brave attempt to create suspense.

The Lodger doesn't fail at all, however, and in spite of some ropey material at times, the three above mentioned leads act their socks off, and are watchable for every second of their screen time.

Less convincing are the cookie-cut Cockneys, the London bobbies in the fog and the behind-the-scenes antics at the music hall, up until the finale of course, which takes place in and around the eaves of a theatre.

It is an epic climax, and worth the wait, something of a classic even. Laird Cregar delivers so much in every scene, it is hard to keep your eyes off him. He is a little like Charles Laughton, an actor born to this, and able to win the viewer with the most subtle and considered acting.

Laird Cregar is indeed fantastic, and gives the performance of his short, short life. He would die in the year of this movie's release, 1944, and aged only 31.