Invisible Stripes (1939)

Invisible Stripes is (1939) starring George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, Jane Bryan and William Holden, is one of those great 1930s movies that lays down some of the rails upon which film noir would soon enough run.

If it's a crime film, if it's a prison film, or if it's a heist film, the chances are that in the Golden Age of the silver screen, this movie may be presented with all the tropes, style and wisdom of film noir.

It's often true, but it also ain't necessarily so. Nobody rushes to call the Falcon films, or the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films film noir ... and yet they deal in crime, conspiracy, and often in the shadows and fog.

The prefiguring of film noir is still quite evident in 1930s cinema. To find it, one can trace the morality of the crimes, cops, robbers, murderers and increasingly, the psychopaths and the teenage tearaways.

Film noir prefiguring aside, Invisible Stripes, directed by Lloyd Bacon is a lot of fun, and acts out that fine 1930s theme of the kids on the street battling with the urge to turn to crime. It's in this environment, that director Lloyd Bacon brings home a few new ideas, including that of the teenage tearaway.

And that tearaway, is committing a certain form of crime, against both the combined moral wealth of the family, and society itself.

The Tell-Tale Heart (1941)

Felt by some of us lovers of the cinema to be a tiny treasure of the silver screen, Jules Dassin's 1941 short feature version of The Tell-Tale Heart features a manic performance from Joseph Schildkraut as the apprentice weaver who kills his cruel master, only to be tormented by guilt, in the aural form of his master's still-beating heart.

Edgar Allan Poe didn’t always transfer successfully to screen, even when dramatised to the utmost in the hands of Roger Corman. And even in Roger Corman’s hands, plenty needed to be added ― including camp, suspense, romance and even back stories and new action.

The divide that is being bridged in the filming of Edgar Allan Poe concerns the massive popularity of Poe’s writing. Because of their short length, their memorable titles and scenes, and the fact that they largely presented a Freudian interior human world, long before there was any Freud or Freudian analysis, kept the writing of Edgar Allan Poe valid ― even unto the 1960s ― these facts alone make Poe tempting indeed for any movie producer.

But in Poe stories there is often not a lot of action, but instead, vortices of interior turmoil. There is sometimes not a lot of dialogue, but instead doubting turns and descriptions of crummy corners, hysterical emotions and vast natural, often unseen forces. There are often strong key images, that everything hinges upon ― and sometimes the stories seem to be entirely internal ― a little like this one.

Death in the Garden (1956)

Death in the Garden (1956), by Luis Buñuel, is not too color, not too adventursome, nor too surreal in tone ... to be a guest on Classic Film Noir.

Death in the Garden is certainly of the film noir period, and appearing in 1956 it includes and adds to a few of film noir favourite themes, including politics, paranoia, the femme fatale, the innocent charged with crimes they didn't commit, and murder, deceit and a bag of greed.

Never could such color be called film noir, and Death in the Garden is a riot of such raucous Eastmancolor, that you'll be seeing bright green jungles in your dreams, after watching it.

Properly titled Le Mort en ce Jardin, and concerning itself with some rugged intrigue, Death in the Garden is a film of two parts, both of which have much to recommend them. 

There are often political kicks to be made in film noir, and it's the same here. In fact Death in the Garden, it is said, sets out in part to play as a mirror-image of Franco’s Spain from which Buñuel exiled himself. 

The theme of rebellion is to the fore and the state oppressors seem keen not only to snatch each worker's share of the natural world - in this case the men are diamond prospectors - and repress any dissent with force.

Watch out though, Simone Signoret is to hand, and as fate would have it, she has not suffered enough, working as a greedy small time prostitute in this sweaty, greed-riven male outback.

Hitler's Children (1943)

Book burning, bad-ass Berlin-based Nazis, tell like it partially is in the fourth highest grossing film of 1943  ― Hitler's Children, directed by Edward Dmytryk.

Hitler's Children stars Tim Holt, Bonita Granville, and Kent Smith.

The film does not mess around in portraying the brutalities real and imaginary associated with the Hitler Youth, represented particularly by two young participants.

Both love and the church stand resolute in the face of the overwhelmeing Nazi menace, which makes a nice change from "democracy" being what everybody is hoping is going to save the day.

At the heart of things is not just an amazing love story, some interesting propaganda and a festival of horrors, but this was directed by one of film noir's then most dynamic exponents, Edward Dmytryk.

Hitler's Children is not entirely Dmytrk's trademark 'docu-drama', although it does have some documentary sequences, even a couple with the Fuhrer of the film's title featured.

It is also told in the barest of flashback which tops and tails it, and proposes to be an American teacher, based in Berlin in 1933.

It also purposes to be an adaptation of the non-fiction book of the same name by American author Gregor Ziemer. The short Disney film and short book that this comes from features the story of Hans, a boy born and raised in Nazi Germany, his indoctrination in the Hitlerjugend, and his eventual march to war.

The story of Hitler's Children is pretty different, and the hero isn't even called Hans. He's called Karl Bruner and his story tells of his zealous youth, rampant career Nazism in the Gestapo, burning love which cannot be quelled, and his demise at the hands of his evil bosses and their puritanical employment practices.