The Man in the Net (1959)

The Man in the Net (1959) is a disappearing suburban wife lousy husband and beautiful young alcoholic missus versus artist versus conformity versus suburbia versus a nasty cop and an angry mob and crazy Connecticut manhunt for a framed and accused husband with assistance form children mystery thriller late late classic era film noir which makes a virtue of an avuncular, painterly but less engaged every year Alan Ladd, starring Carolyn Jones and Charles McGraw in a noir which has so many classic psychological tones that one would argue that had this script been filmed in 1949 or 1939, the resultant noir would have been prototypically excellent, as opposed what it is, a fully toned late period weirdismal reflection of of realism.

Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca (1942) is the one of a kind classic cinema anti-Nazi tale of war time love and intrigue which regularly appears in greatest film of all time compositions and not that often in classic film noir selections nor even moderate noir canons, nor even in the non-canonical and noir at a stretch.

Funny that Casablanca was not an instant hit and funny that your first thoughts are that the special effects are not that good for the greatest film of all time. 

By which you mean that the basic investment made in this greatest film of all time seems moderate to say the least. The aeroplane and some of the attending dressing of scene, the special effects.

Mission to Moscow (1943)

Mission to Moscow (1943) is a lengthy docu-style pro-Stalinist American mid-War political and diplomatic film noir tour of pre-World War Two Europe and the Soviet Union, displaying Nazi activity in the USA and in Germany and offering a vaguely unique 120 minutes of cinematic earnest as diplomat Joseph E. Davies, a handpicked business choice by President Roosevelt, featured in shadow, moves pleasantly and occasionally with a furrowed brow through the landscapes of the Nazi world of confusion which presaged the fatal conflagration of the early to mid 1940s.

Black Fury (1935)

Black Fury (1935) is a labour relations coal country Pennsylvania-based Warner Bros. working class mining rough-shoddily Slav impersonating private police force versus striking miners based on a historic incident melodrama, with a poor American mining community relentlessly portrayed as a mob of easily swayed poverty stricken proles, versus the kind of private company police force that used to only a few years earlier, in 1929, beat to death striking workers that happened to be standing under the wrong club et sturdy baton.

That is in certain fact the story of John Barcoski who immigrated in to the USA in 1906, who was Polish, and who was beaten to death in Pennsylvannia by the PA's Coal and Iron Police on February 10th, 1929.

We're No Angels (1955)

We're No Angels (1955) is a Michael Curtiz Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray Christmas themed inappropriate island based prison break comedy in full studio colour as the trio fun and blunder through some uncanny voyeuristic crapulent more than semi-sexist kind of misery as comedy experience as they play three escapees from Devil's Island, the penal colony of Cayenne (French: Bagne de Cayenne), commonly known as Île du Diable, which was a French penal colony that operated for 100 years, from 1852 to 1952, and officially closed in 1953, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana.

The Sea Wolf (1941)

The Sea Wolf (1941) is a nautical noir ghost ship of shame and cruelty dramatic abduction and high seas wrecking crew medical and maritime madness Jack London adapted tale of intersecting American narratives combining the frontier of the sea with the oldest narrative tropes known to the continent, including the olden mania of the rogue seamaster and the anti-Nietzschean struggle for the victory of normalcy over ubermenshcary.

Michael Curtiz's 1941 adaptation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf occupies a peculiar intersection of seafaring adventure, psychological realism, and the film noir sensibility emerging in Hollywood during the wartime period. 

Flamingo Road (1949)

Flamingo Road (1949) is a woman against the world Southern local bully class-status drama hostess-at-a-roadhouse film noir of complicated romances, and double crosses.

Directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Joan Crawford, Zachary Scott, Sydney Greenstreet, and David Brian, the screenplay for Flamingo Road (1949) was written by Robert Wilder. It was based on a 1946 play written by Wilder and his wife, Sally, which in turn was based on Robert Wilder’s 1942 novel of the same name.

The plot follows an ex-carnival dancer who marries a local businessman to seek revenge on a corrupt political boss who had her railroaded into prison. Some of the more salacious aspects of the novel were downplayed in the film due to the Hollywood Production Code.

The Unsuspected (1947)

The Unsuspected (1947) is a multiply textured mystery and suspense film noir starring Claude Rains as a handsome patriarchal radio show presenter, who specialises in true crime. For film noir — it's a way of life.

Technology and murder combine in The Unsuspected in the form of Claude Rains' own master studio where he engineers as much evil as he does family entertainment, with his hi-tech equipment.

Victor Grandison (Claude Rains) plays a character more embedded in crime than most, and hosts a murder mystery radio show. 

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) is a fun Pre-Code horror pre-Noir classic from Michael Curtiz, starring Glenda Farrell and Fay Wray.

This is a horror picture from the filmic age of innocence when in theory anything went before the Film Production Code cracked down on everybody and made morality great again, probably and incidentally creating the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s as it did so.

When sculptor Ivan Igor's London wax museum is burned down by his treacherous partner, he is left devastated. 

Ten years later in the then-present day New York, Igor opens a new museum, with more lifelike statues than ever before. Something mysterious and evil is behind his genius for wax likeness, but what could it be!

Horror films of the 1930s are an interesting prospect. Horror films of this time don't really lay bare the cultural zeitgeist, but usually looked at how science, crime and the supernatural intersected.

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) is the great post-code gangster film. 

The fun truth that is constant about film noir, is that at its heart it does talk about morality. 

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) directed by Michael Curtiz for Warner Brothers, and starring James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, The Dead End Kids, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, and George Bancroft, makes at a stab at futurity and morality, the twin pins that the production is based on.

This is flat out morality with as much gangsterism as could be squeezed on to the screen, while Catholicism beckons from the sidelines, filtered through the rough-housing rough antics of a real juvenile delinquent squad of tearaways, who wreck the movie, much as the real life juvenile actors behaved true to type and wrecked the studio. 

This is an irony because film noir was brought about itself by the imposition of a moral code on cinema production, and film noir became an artistic way to discuss this code and frame its requirements in the most interesting ways possible.

The Breaking Point (1950)

The Breaking Point (1950) is a swell of a smart film noir drama that falls sweetly across the boundary between 1040s and 1950s cinema.

The movie stars John Garfield, who plays the otherwise moral captain of a charter boat who becomes financially strapped and is drawn into illegal activities in order to keep up payments on his boat.

Across the varieties of film noir, there are many flavours, and this includes the tragic drama that has elements of film noir, as here in The Breaking Point.

Although not complex, the story is interesting because of the realism brought to the characters, an exchange made in favour of dropping the more familiar and fantastical elements of film noir.

One of the most common themes and juxtapositions in film noir, is made between domestic life and the life of crime, or at least the life 'out there' in the city of danger.

Nora Prentiss (1947)

Nora Prentiss (1947) and starring Ann Sheridan may not make it on to the major league lists of the great film noirs, but it could still teach us more about the style than many other flicks.

As an object lesson in the behaviours of the femme fatale, Nora Prentiss is an elevated example of that great noir trope - the family man falling foul of the femme fatale. 

What we learn is maybe unintentionally revealed. But the classic figure of the femme fatale represents much more than the dangers of sex, or living loose on the rough side of the city. She represents female emancipation and this being Hollywood and the manners of middle America, that can only be a bad thing. 

Kent Smith plays the mild mannered and successful family man who has it all, and is about to find out the hard way, what it means to lose it, by falling for the wrong woman. That in essence is the straightforward moral and the quick plot summary here, but this is film noir, and the waters run deep.

First is the exciting opening of the movie, featuring a strange shrouded character who is being led to trial, and who will neither speak nor reveal their true identity.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Mildred Pierce (1945) is  a Michael Curtiz James M. Cain flashback but barely any voiceover detourned woman's picture murder mystery femme fatale female success story lousy husband children-in-film-noir family tragedy tragic love triangle rags to riches to darkened beach house classic film noir starring Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth, Eve Arden, Zachary Scott, Jack Carson, Bruce Bennett and Veda Ann Borg.

A classic film noir indeed, and also a great melodrama, a story which from the off when it bangs iunto beach house action followed by a suicidal moment at the docks, this melodrama is not a film noir in its immediate sea-sweeping seconds, and the theme music is that of a woman's picture, that so-called real entity of the era, the project that is detoruned ce noir la.