The Big Shot (1942)

The Big Shot (1942) is a Warner Bros. three-time-loser prison break couple-on-the-run innocent-man-convicted heist and gangland crime film noir thriller with Humphrey Bogart as the sympathetic gangster mob boss hero and Irene Manning as the woman he loves.

As any canon of work relies on trope and recognition, trope and repetition, all of which should be traceable back into the originating myths of its society, here is an archetypal late 1930s tale of motor madness, criminal expression, and the determination to go straight.

The latter is one of the greatest themes of the era. There were men who were innocent caught up in crime, there were veterans returning from the moral order of war to the confused criminal urban environments, and there were the charismatic guilty, who try as they might, could not avoid crime.

Dust Be My Destiny (1939)

Dust Be My Destiny (1939) is an innocent-man-jailed moral drifter narrative prison farm social state of the US couple on the run drama and romance proto noir which expresses noir moments and captures noir sentiment, as it bums across the states in various wagons and train carriages, always expressive of the idea that love will out.

Dust Be My Destiny (1939) is beautifully staged expression of what America sought most for itself, the idea of what it was set to become, its deepest anxieties about morality expressed in individual and romantic action from John Garfield, largely.