Blind Date (1959)

Blind Date (1959) is a Losey Limey London-based violence-against-women flashback and sophisticated murder mystery puzzle artist anti-hero police procedural erotic class and privilege social corruption film noir, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Hardy Krüger, Stanley Baker and Michelene Presle, with extra Gordon Jackson for the hardy Brit fan that likes a bit of the Scotch roughage in uniform.

In 1959, amid the twilight of post-war certainties and the emergent undercurrents of cultural upheaval in Britain, Joseph Losey released Blind Date (retitled Chance Meeting for its American audience). 

The Lawless (1950)

The Lawless (1950) is a racially charged journalism and media civil rights and leftist crusading journalist film gris film noir concerned about the plight of California state's fruit pickers, mostly immigrants from Mexico who are disparagingly referred to as "fruit tramps".

Film gris, in a world of micro classification, most especially among the classification of mid century noir, in defining film noir, the leading cultural and most defining of all that lost century's art forms, gris is most certainly a thing to behold, a useful methodology, and this is a terrific movie, super enjoyable, racing with fun and aggression, and containing multitudes of great moments, cementing a heartful place in the fact of film noir's place in the civil rights story of the times.

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.

The Intimate Stranger (1956)

In the difficult old tradition of American film noir directors, stars, writers and technicians fleeing the blacklists of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Joseph Losey made several decent British film noir movies, including The Intimate Stranger (1956), a mystery tale of deceit from the heart of the British film industry.

And likely when you see it, it will be called FINGER OF GUILT.

But have no fear, this was and remains the American title of this Losey lost noir, Losey who was working under the alias Alec C. Snowden, having as we have seen, fled The States in the midst of Red Terror.

Finger of Guilt or The Intimate Stranger, then, you may take your pick.

Losey was blacklisted in the United States at the time when he made this film, and with a number of other American directors and screenwriters, he had moved to Britain and began making films, disguising his real identity behind an alias. 1956 was that kind of year.

The screenplay was written by Howard Koch who had also been blacklisted, and wrote under the name Peter Howard. The film was made at Shepperton Studios, with Losey using as we have seen already, the non-noir handle and nom de guerre, Mr Incognito himself ... Alec C. Snowden. 

Losey also has a small cameo part in the film, playing a film director.