No Way Out (1950)

No Way Out (1950) is a medical crime and fraternal revenge and racist mob race war film noir starring Sydney Poitier, Linda Darnell, Richard Widmark and Stepehen McNally. It's a tense and immense pretence with a sense of offence and it's also a noir classic, for several reasons, the least of which are the serious and more fantastic civil rights, and mass race relations race riot.

In order to historicise the idea of Black activist communities and groups, a junk yard of creeping figures emerges, but it could be argued that the multi-****** quoting racist lead has its own cliched aspects, and the dual creation, while imbalanced as racist itself, is just that, and is a creation. There never was a junkyard fight, was there?

My Darling Clementine (1946)

My Darling Clementine (1946) is a poetic, mythic Western rather than a noir-inflected one. But yet it surfaces in film noir lists as crossover material, and the big critickers of the century do like to hat-tip it as a noiresque style of western adventure.

I’m curious about the film noir style in My Darling Clementine, noting moody cinematography, deep shadows, lawlessness, and moral ambiguity. Characters like Doc Holliday and Linda Darnell enrich this dark, personal narrative.

Although My Darling Clementine (1946) is most often celebrated as a classical John Ford Western rather than a noir-inflected film, a few stylistic and thematic elements overlap with the film noir sensibility. Below are some of the key noir-like components you can find in the film.

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.

A Letter To Three Wives (1949)

A Letter To Three Wives (1949) is a Joseph L. Mankiewicz female returning veteran multiple lousy husband female inferiority complex suburban melodrama romantic mystery radio and television advertising satire failing American Dream special audio effect inserting class barriers and rattling trains humour woman's picture which stars but does not credit Thelma Ritter and makes a mock of marriage, radio and American suburban culture as the 50s dawn, mystery woman comic but anxious fiasco character humour and anthology structured film classic of period empowerment for fifties women, of the sort fabricatable fashion that is managed to restore hetero and gender normative happy endings for the childless nuclear family.

Fallen Angel (1945)

"Hey you — I’ve seen the sleeping act before. You know your ticket ran out the last stop!"

With these words a sassy ass bus driver drops off the world’s next noir victim on the outskirts of Walton, and in the middle of the night.

It’s Fallen Angel, a film noir starring Alice Faye, Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell, director Otto Preminger.

Stuck in Walton, 150 miles short of his destination, our anti-hero Dana Andrews wanders into the local diner, where the locals are up to a decent amount of skulduggery, worried about a missing girl called Stella.

It isn’t long before the said floozy breezes in, her legs at a dangerous angle.

She swipes the hero’s hamburger and he exits to wander the streets alone.