The Front Page (1931)

The Front Page (1931) is a journalism and media Lewis Milestone pre-code screwball death row telephony comedy classic United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" public domain brilliant early talkie perfectly transferring into screen terms a stage classic of the twenties ribald rat-a-tat dialogue movie creation which imagines into life a new American archetype, the fast-talking, hard-drinking newshound who'll do anything for a scoop, starring Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns, Pat O'Brien as Hildebrand "Hildy" Johnson, Mary Brian as Peggy Grant, Edward Everett Horton as Roy V. Bensinger, Walter Catlett as Jimmy Murphy, George E. Stone as Earl Williams, Mae Clarke as Molly Malloy, Slim Summerville as Irving Pincus, Matt Moore as Ernie Kruger, Frank McHugh as "Mac" McCue, Clarence Wilson as Sheriff Peter B. "Pinky" Hartman. 

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 Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is a high period film noir telling a complex tale of love, weakness, criminality and fateful meetings. 

As in the mode of any high grade film noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) speaks of the past and its characters' inability to escape it. 

In fact the characters in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) seems to exist around one moment in the past, a fateful once when Martha Ivers committed a murder as young girl.

Everything else in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is about what this murder brings about, creating a drama of many parts, fixedly rooted in one fateful and distant moment.

Moreover, it's a complex film — not a classic love triangle story, but something more akin to a love parallelogram.

Edge of Darkness (1943)

Edge of Darkness (1943) is a Nazi-heavy Norwegian war romp with more dead bodies in its opening few minutes than you could shake any number of Nazi pointing devices at, assuming your Nazi pointing devices were not too busy pointing things out on your incredibly detailed Nazi models of Norwegian villages, strategic or otherwise.

The alternative title for this amazing war effort is Norway In Revolt, which does sum things up in a manner of speaking.

And once viewers have overcome the surprise of the many piles of dead bodies, piled across other dead bodies, piled inside and outside in mounds and heaps which would seem utterly infeasible, had the bodies once supposed to have been alive, there is a fairly exciting, fairly tepid, and at times pleasantly complex film awaiting, promising not just Errol Flynn, but more critically than this, Ann Sheridan.

Yes, you can come for the piles of bodies or the Norwegian models, or the overtly evil and ridiculous Nazis, but it turns out that only Ann Sheridan is worth the wait.