Hell's Half Acre (1954)

Hell's Half Acre (1954) is a female seeker film noir about a woman who travels to Hawaii to investigate her missing or dead racketeer husband.

As a rather unique slice of Hawaii noir, Hell's Half Acre stars Evelyn Keyes as the seeker hero on the trail and Wendell Corey as the lousy husband, who is actually still alive but changed his identity due to his own criminal activities. 

Hell's Half Acre was written screen by Steve Fisher, who also wrote I Wake Up Screaming which is a sure-fire classic film noir 

It's set in a rundown section of Honolulu, incredibly well photographed it has to be said, and down there on Honolulu's skid row there are all kinds.

City That Never Sleeps (1953)

City That Never Sleeps (1953) is a criminal-spirit-of-the-city film noir drama directed by John H. Auer and starring Gig Young, Mala Powers, William Talman, Edward Arnold, Chill Wills, Marie Windsor, and Paula Raymond, with cinematography by John L. Russell.

In an film noir canon now advanced by several hundred film noir presentations, the 1953 movie City That Never Sleeps is self-conscious enough to be looking at noir from the inside. Certain noir conventions appear to be so perfectly understood by the time that City That Never Sleeps came to be produced in 1953, that they are not even explained.

For example the head and corporate villain of the piece, the rather articulately named Penrod Biddel (Edward Arnold) is most likely the head of a crime organisation which we never see, and is certainly a business man — although we do not see very much of his business as such — and is certainly a criminal — although likewise we see very little of his criminal activity.

The Narrow Margin (1952)

The Narrow Margin (1952) is a tightly-drawn and unyielding train-bound classic film noir thriller starring Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor, largely set on board a cross-country passenger locomotive.

The set-up is that Detective Sergeant Walter Brown (played by Charles McGraw) has to protect a mob boss's widow, Mrs. Frankie Neall (Marie Windsor), as she rides a train from Chicago to Los Angeles to testify before a grand jury. 

The boss's wife is also carrying a payoff list that belonged to her murdered husband and the mob's hitmen do not know what she looks like. On the way to pick her up, Brown bets his partner and friend, Sergeant Gus Forbes (Don Beddoe), that he knows what she will look like: "She's the sixty-cent special. Cheap. Flashy. Strictly poison under the gravy."

The Sniper (1952)

The Sniper is a 1952 psycho assassin deranged youth sex-pest film noir, directed by Edward Dmytryk, written by Harry Brown and based on a story by Edna and Edward Anhalt. 

The story is one of psychotic misogyny and the possibility of reform, as the police psychologist played by Richard Kiley, argues for treatment over incarceration and the death sentence.

The killer is an arch anti-woman boy with issues galore, a difficult thing to express on screen in 1952. That it is achieved soberly and without camp or cliché is testament to the cast and crew of The Sniper.

The film features Adolphe Menjou, Arthur Franz, Gerald Mohr and Marie Windsor, and is most notable of all perhaps for its fine San Francisco setting and photography.

The police have snipers too, and two decades before the rooftops of San Francisco became the hunting grounds of Dirty Harry Callaghan they are focused here on a mixture of police procedural, sensational woman-hating, and urban surveillance by both police forces and forces of psychopathy.

The Killing (1956)

The Killing (1956) by Stanley Kubrick is like a graduation class for many of the best stars and tropes of the classic film noir style.

As well as a cast including many of the styles favourites, from Sterling Hayden and Elisha Cook Jnr, through Marie Windsor and Jay C. Flippen, to Ted de Corsia and Joe Sawyer, The Killing is a kind of celebration of the style like no other.

It was in fact possible by 1956 to make almost consciously film noir pictures. The themes of robbery, lust and anti-social activity are there, and like some truly epic expressions of the style, there are no good people to talk of in here.

In fact possibly the only good character is the wife of one of the villains, portrayed as unwell and blind, and the reason for this man's turning to crime.

Force of Evil (1948)

Force of Evil (1948) is a classic New York numbers racket conflicted brothers pre-HUAC and voiced-over film noir with many biblical allusions (Cain and Abel, Judas's betrayal, stigmata) which pits a rising Wall Street lawyer against the modernising principles of post-war capitalism and the fascinating blue-collar practise of playing the numbers game.

Film noir is darkness, film noir is crime and film noir is human folly . . . writ large and personal, as a force of evil.  Film noir renders a cinema of weakness, deceit, lust-inspired crime, greed and mid-century urban survival.  

In the film noir city disasters are acted out in bars, cars and street corners, or in cheerless apartments, suggestive of a kind of homelessness.