Silver Lode (1954)

Silver Lode (1954) is an anti-McCarthy communist movie industry witch-hunt scandal film noir western angry mob in a small town revenge cat and mouse Wile West thriller romance and adventure murder and public disorder noir inflected western Lin which wedding bells curdle into mob hysteria, authority masquerades as law, suspicion metastasizes, and a lone man is publicly lynched by paperwork, starring Dan Duryea, Lizabeth Scott, John Payne and a few other fifties film faithfuls, in a tidy rather false-looking western town set setting wrapped up in a Fourth of July barbecue, but did they have barbecues in the wild west?

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.

The Racket (1951)

The Racket (1951) is a tough-guy crooked cop corporate crime thriller noir which pits cop against mobster in a classic tale of urban violence, corporate criminality and corruption which may in fact go all the way to the to the top — a great new flavour of wickedness for the 1950s, as the more fantastical and psychological elements of personal corruption are left in the shadowy fun of the 1940s.

As an exercise in casting, The Racket (1951) is a film noir which pulls together so many favourite actors and even directors, that it might appear hard to miss. You'll maybe want to know why The Racket ain't a classic film noir — given that it features Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum and Lizabeth Scott, supported by William Conrad and William Talman, and with direction from not just the credited John Cromwell, but from Nicholas Ray and Tay Garnett also.

Too Late For Tears (1949)

Too Late for Tears (1949) stars Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea as first lady and super-sap of classic film noir, in a fantastic and twisted set of murder plots focused on a sack of dough and one of noir's best femme fatale characters.

You'd be pushed to find a more textbook cheaply made classic film noir than Too Late For Tears, starring Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea.

Cheap it may be, but Too Late For Tears packs a mighty punch. The flick opens with a simple premise which has been much repeated over the years: a young couple come across some ill-gotten money, and their decision to keep it reverberates hard.

Nobody in any movie at any time hands in the money they find. There would of course be no movie if that happened, no moralising, no murder, no suspense and no desperate sliding into purgatory as the noose tightens, and increasingly hard decisions need to be taken. 

Stolen Face (1952)

Stolen Face is a slightly wacky, strange fantasy fable 1952 British film noir directed by Terence Fisher and starring Paul Henreid, Lizabeth Scott and André Morell.

Lizabeth Scott and Paul Henreid star in this British oddity, in which a plastic surgeon rashly attempts to both satisfy his love life and solve female criminality ― by means of his skilled rhinoplastic practises.

The resulting fantasy, Stolen Face (1952) is more in line with the fantastic and horrific than it is with the criminal, and its film noir fibre lies only in its paranoid view of male sexuality, and crime.

To get this out of the way before anything else, the oddity in question concerns the notion that the heroical plastic surgeon played by Paul Henreid has concerning beauty, femininity and crime. 

His is an odd thesis: that if only a woman were beautiful, she would not become involved in crime.

Hence this fantasy fable is part mad-scientist story, which verges on horror and suspense, has a stab at being a love story, and is all-in on the misogyny required to tell a story which is all about the moral importance of female beauty.

I Walk Alone (1947)

I Walk Alone (1949) is a bold, fun and fast-moving flick with a truly film noir title.

It's a strong exemplar of the film noir style, even if it isn't held up as the one of the greats.

Frankie gets out of prison and after being triggered by the sight if some shadows at the station which remind him of prison bars, he heads down to Broadway ― it looks the same he says. 

But his pal isn’t so sure. The first early signs of the fast-bending steel of the film noir male, here beautifully and memorably played by Burt Lancaster, is one minute in, when he says angrily, and almost to himself  . . . that it better be the same.

It is not of course, the same. The war, and prison, similarly dealt with and both brutal and emotional in their transformative violence . . . these have changed everything. 

The war and prison have more in common that Burt Lancaster's sympathetic and tragic expression. And if one can be in one for the purposes of entertainment, one can certainly be in the other.

Desert Fury (1947)

Racy, gaudy and melodramatic, Desert Fury (1947) commences as a somewhat typical if confused film noir.

In full and blazing colour, ripping back and fore across the wilds of the fictional Chuckawalla, and ultimately settles on the fraught mother and daughter relationship between two Golden Age favourites ― Lizbeth Scott and Mary Astor.

The cast is strong ― John Hodiak and Wendell Corey play two barely sublimated homosexual gangsters, while Burt Lancaster has little to do as the local police deputy. 

The crux of the capering belongs to the aforementioned Lizbeth Scott and Mary Astor, two women in search of more than just each others' love.

Pitfall (1948)

If Fatal Attraction represents the male pitfall-movie of the 1980s, with Glenn Close presumably playing a role akin to the AIDS virus, then Pitfall (1948 André de Toth) is the 1940s equivalent, with Dick Powell sliding into the equally heinous sin of finding life too boring. 

This is exactly the opening scenario of The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, and as in The Woman in the Window, the point is laboured in Pitfall.

With the war done and dusted, in fact, it seemed like a whole bunch of the film noir guys wanted a bit more action.

And there were a bevy of the deadliest women in the world on hand to supply it, steeped in the forbidden social excess and treachery that can only lead to trouble — and of course death.