The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947)

The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947) is a lousy husband paranoid woman blackmail murder and poison mystery manor house art and intrigue infidelity and obsession Mark Hellinger portraits of women in noir film noir starring Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Alexis Smith and Nigel Bruce.

You might imagine that this melange of mild madness and misty focused love and lust has often been misapprehended as an ungainly hybrid of overwrought melodrama and tepid suspense. Such assessments have become axiomatic, yet they do not withstand close inspection. 

Though the film remains aesthetically uneven, it exerts a strange and unrelenting fascination, anchored by peculiar tonal shifts and grotesque exaggerations that reveal, rather than obscure, its psychological acuity.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) is not just a classic but is likely the classic, classic Sherlock Holmes movie.

It is the debut movie of the most iconic Holmes on screen of them all, being Basil Rathbone. That is to say the greatest of all time, and its place in the classic film noir story.

Historical and faithful, wonderful and trend-setting, and with a noir-themed foggy soundstage, in an era just before World War, expressing the accumulated sophistication of the movie making of the 1930s, with more to commend it than simply its being a pure and fun expression of the Holmes story, as well as being the first of 14 films, which came to type a legend into the annals of cinema, drama, and noir.

Out on Fox's enormous back lots, the landscapes of Devonshire came to life  and notably there was no hint at all with any participating artist, producer nor technician, no suggestion that there would be any more Sherlock Holmes films after this one.

After landing the role, Basil Rathbone said:

"I think that Holmes is one of the greatest characters in fiction. With all the thousands of detective and mystery stories that have been written since, the name of Sherlock Holmes still stands at the head of the roster of famous sleuths. It is synonymous with the very word 'detective'. To play such a character means as much to me as ten Hamlets."

Rebecca (1940)

Rebecca (1940) is the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece that won Best Picture and Best Cinematography Oscars in 1940, and was nominated for seven more, and may both be and not be held by those who have a say in these matters to be a film noir.

But if Rebecca is not an example of film noir, what then is Rebecca, with its suspense, mystery, paranoia and brooding atmosphere?

Rebecca in fact while not held as being film noir, does feature many of the aspects of the genre which may be called the paranoid woman film: a young woman, captive in body and mind, lost in a spooky house masquerading as a family home; and a husband who may or may not be homicidal, possibly also even suicidal.

Thing is, in this production, the husband is captive too, which may be a more accurate psychological assessment of marriage. At the very least, Rebecca is a firm and fine example of the paranoid woman genre, and is certainly also to be considered in many aspects as -  an example of film noir.