Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) is an autobiographical Tennesse Williams psychosurgery paranoid woman benevolent aunt madness or truth thinly veiled story about the unspeakable, homosexuality, Southern aristocracy and madness unsung surreal masterpiece of intriguing and twsited based on a play theatricals around a mad sister and a dead son, and a proposed lobotomy, and a pscyhoanalytico-religio-sacrificial erotomania suppression of women symbolic Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed film noir psycho-melodrama starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.

Blackmail (1929)

Blackmail (1929) is an Alfred Hitchcock 1920s police procedural attempted rape and murder in self defence classic British film noir hit sound movie production based on a play and brutally blackly comic cinematic late dip towards higher modernism in the form and its technical prowess as it entered the 1930s, and this film which is clear evidence of the Hitchcockian it is also at its height horrific.

Apologies if the film noir canon is to be legally formatted in the 1920s, the thought is not tuned into the key features of the style, so it is unusual to call it a classic, and yet unanimous support from the Film Noir Board in fact classify it, classicify it if you can, that is the verdict.

She-Wolf of London (1946)

She-Wolf of London (1946) is a historic romantic foggy London lupine lycanthropic murder mystery police procedural women alone in a gothic mansion average film of mystery which certainly qualifies for film noir in many aspects and without offering too many spoilers, is also much within the paranoid woman genre, although which is somewhat blended in the not too wolfy mix — though don't go be expectin no monsters cuz there bain't be none I'm afraid.

Suspicion (1942)

Suspicion (1942) is an Alfred Hitchcock birth of psychological film noir era foaming seas beneath the cliffs and motor car as lethal weapon gothic romance drama abusive behaviour gaslighting and lousy husband bullying-and-belittling-style paranoid woman film noir classique, and probably a classic film noir, starring Cary Grant as the sarcastic, mysterious, lousy husband from somewhere between farce and vaudeville, Joan Fontaine as his target and constant, and Nigel Bruce as a buddy bumbler comic face pulling foil, and containing the full silver service of Hitchcock mental cruelty, as Joan Fontaine instantly transforms from bookish, educated and independent professional woman into sensual and servile lover and then into quivering gaslit wreck.

The Uninvited (1944)

The Ray Milland Season Advances at a Crawl

The Uninvited (1944) is a supernatural clifftop haunted house, Cornish clifftop haunted house paranoid woman writer as hero portraits in noir gothic horror ghost chiller love and romance drama with a dog shot by Lewis Allen and starring Ray Milland, Gail Russell, Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, Alan Napier, and Cornelia Otis Skinner.

Few films of the 1940s reach the uncanny stillness and dignified unease as well as the fantastic silliness and dignified quease of The Uninvited (1944). 

Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent (1946) is a paranoid women lousy husband drama woman's picture-style essential woman's picture film noir story of riches, jealousy, egregious abuses of domestic trust, and all out manic equine-based murder plot around a mystery Mitchum-alike sibling and significant and pressing hunky love interest in a rough leather jacket.

Undercurrent starts with normality, suburbia in the snow, the very surface that film noir was about to break, when 1946 spilled into the century and sped the future on with its weirdismal messaging about the martyrdom and murderdoom of wifely women.

Chase A Crooked Shadow (1958)

Chase A Crooked Shadow (1958) is a paranoid woman assumed identity deceit and fleecing meticulous murder chamber drama British film noir with subverting notions of expectation as well as dark and shadowy double-play and in this case situated on coastal Spain, starring Anne Baxter as a typically doubting covers-gripping shocked and terrified femme indoors, with a special twist, and a great cast of Alexander Knox, Herbert Lom, Richard Todd and Faith Brook.

Michael Anderson's 1958 suspense thriller Chase a Crooked Shadow is a taut chamber drama that simultaneously flaunts its artificiality and derives power from its formal claustrophobia. Conceived as a British answer to the Hitchcockian mystery, the film cloaks its familiar conceit in an elegant mise-en-scène and haunting moral ambiguity. 

Bewitched (1945)

Bewitched (1945) is a paranoid woman psychological voice-in-her-head voiceover flashback assumed identity psychological terror supernatural schizophrenic medical insane woman fleeing marriage hypnotism flashback and voice over film noir from the dark height of the golden age of the silver screen's era.

The term classic film noir does doubtless evoke as it is intended to do, a series of high powered and famous high stakes noir dramas from the period, usually of eminent structure and production, and preserved by film registries and their buffs, citing such names as Double Indemnity and the rest of the well-trod shuffle of the mighty, while 1945 alone boasts the classics of Detour (1845), Scarlet Street (1945), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Lost Weekend (1945), yes it's the year that film noir won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

No Man of Her Own (1950)

No Man of Her Own (1950) is a railroad-crash victim assumed identity paranoia and single-mother vindictive ex blackmail murder weeper noir, styled as a woman's picture and ladled with paranoia, faux feminist discourse, oppressive attitudes and bizarre gender relational aspects which rather than diminish the role of women in the 1940s and 1950s golden age of Hollywood and film noir crossover period, go to show that gender roles while not conforming to post-feminist roles do play important aspect-features in the creation of the newly birthed global organisation that was the United States.

It is one of four films Barbara Stanwyck made in 1950, and she plays a pregnant woman mistaken for the person whose wedding ring she happens by the magic of storytelling to be wearing during a train crash. 

Shock (1946)

Shock (1946) is a paranoid woman gaslit-to-madness sanatorium-based evil doctor psychological murder thriller from the golden age of the paranoid woman movie, which is coincident with the golden age of Hollywood, if that is a fact that matters?

The ultimate expression of the paranoid woman trope, so common to the 1940s, has a completely sane female character committed to a sanatorium where she is driven mad, in testing circumstances, brought to the brink, and made mad in the face of truth.

Dangerous Crossing (1953)

Dangerous Crossing (1953) is a maritime murder conspiracy mystery paranoid woman heiress in distress missing husband silly-newlywed-woman version of the well tested film noir trope of the vulnerable woman, lost in a world of romance that is fear-bitten, weird and underwritten by criminal conspiracy.

That most classic of mystery setups is no longer employed by the movies, the one in which all the world seems to be a conspiracy. No, madam, the purser has not seen your husband. No, madam, this is not your cabin and your bags were never here, your husband was never on this ship. This story is used again and again by da moviemakers, and here it is in a well-formed and perfect trope, creating rough ripples and mystery.

The Return of The Whistler (1948)

The Return of The Whistler (1948) is a Cornell Woolrich family plot paranoid woman cheapo The Whistler series film noir tale from the high period of American film serial and film noir cinema.

It's an old noir ruse, to frame up the female inheritor of a largescale superdoughed family estate and then persuade her that she is mad, until she almost or really does become mad, only to melt into relief after discovering that suburban and middle class, or elite living is in fact a sham, a conspiracy and an utter hoax of frauds.

The film begins with Ted meeting Alice Dupres Barkley, a young French woman played by Lenore Aubert. Despite knowing each other for only two days, the couple impulsively decides to marry.

Woman in Hiding (1950)

Woman in Hiding (1950) is a woman against the world lousy husband flashback murder and female seeker hero film noir, starring Ida Lupino as a wife on the run, escaping from a murderous marriage and finding love on the run in the form of lackadaisical magazine and cigar seller Howard Duff.

Corporate villainy also appears in this car smashin chase and hide thriller in the form of Stephen McNally playing an industry boss who is going to be appropriate screen material for the 1950s, straight outta war and into world domination, starting with mob behaviour in the boardroom.

I would seem from the Wikipedia entry on Woman in Hiding (1950) that not everybody agrees that this is a film noir. The works that are cited are the super-seminal and all-ruling guide to the subject of film noir,  Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton (2002). A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953), and Ian Brookes Film Noir: A Critical Introduction. 

Sudden Fear (1952)

Sudden Fear (1952) is a paranoid woman psychological stalking thriller film noir from the golden age of sinister and romantic wife's suspicion of her husband pictures.

Ever since Suspicion indeed, on the one hand, and Rebecca on the other, volumes of reel of film have told the tales of the paranoid woman of the era, she is the very sight of the times and the very words sudden fear themselves may be used to describe noir itself, it's attack vogue, it's play in the dark nature, the insuring lustre of stars on the screen, reworking in this case the themes, of suspicion, and the key player in the play of death is a dictating machine, a media within the media.

Sleep, My Love (1948)

Sleep, My Love (1948) is a mid-period amnesia husband wife-murder noir based on a story by the great Leo Rosten.

As the story of a paranoid woman being drugged, hypnotised and gaslit into madness, Sleep, My Love features a host of film noir tropes that were hot in the 1940s.

The star of the show and the subject of the drama is Alison Courtland, a wealthy New Yorker, who hasn't a clue how she ended up waking up screaming on a train bound for Boston. When she phones her husband, Richard, the police listen in and overhear that she had threatened him with a gun.

The Locket (1946)

The Locket (1946) is a noir of nested narratives — a kleptomaniac paranoid psychoanalytic flashback within a flashback film noir which unravels one woman's secret life and haunted past. 

This psychological thriller  directed by John Brahm stars Laraine Day, Brian Aherne, Robert Mitchum, and Gene Raymond, and was released by RKO Pictures. 

The film is based on a screenplay by Sheridan Gibney and adapted from "What Nancy Wanted" by Norma Barzman, wife of later-blacklisted writer Ben Barzman. 

The set up is an interrupted wedding, the stuff of nightmares. John Willis (Gene Raymond) is about to marry bride to be Nancy (Laraine Day), but a man named Harry Blair (Brian Aherne) crashes the wedding. 

Possessed (1947)

Possessed (1947) is high period paranoid woman family mystery amnesiac film noir with complexities galore, and starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin and Raymond Massey.

Working wonders with the flashback structure, Possessed starts in dramatic style with a woman on the wander through some vacant city streets, murmuring only the name 'David' to herself.

The opening, which punches hard upon the perennial themes of urban isolation and amnesiac or damaged individuals lost within these concreted jungle confines, opens the door to frame an entirely flashback-told story of a woman called Louise Howell, played by Joan Crawford, who is presumably the possessed character of the title.

The Sign of the Ram (1948)

The Sign of the Ram (1948) is a paranoid woman lighthouse-tinted family dynamic film noir with Susan Peters as paralysed poet Leah St Aubyn, a conflicted woman who attempts to psychologically unsettle those around her.

The film marked Susan Peters' return to the screen after a three-year absence following a gun accident that paralysed her. It was her final film.

There is a solid fear factor Cornish foam alert for SPOILERS because the logic of film noir The Sign of the Ram is cast horrific and solid in the portrayal of Susan Peters in something that at the time and for some time after was unique among wheelchair roles in Hollywood.

The creepy house of secrets was a firm feature too of family noir, most especially if that house is in England, and of course it has to be on a cliff. Within the house is tragedy and secrecy, something that film noir was custom built to suggest. Within shadows, mystery, and within mystery, suspense.

Notorious (1946)

Notorious (1946) by Alfred Hitchcock is an espionage romance story, with film noir overtones.

The picture stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, with support from Claude Rains, and is a favourite among Alfred Hitchcock lovers for its mature cinematic portrayal of a love affair. 

The film noir overtones that characterise Notorious are best illustrated in the dark forces that negatively affect Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) in the form of alcohol and poison, both of which cause her hallucinations that are shared with the viewers of the film through noir photography, fully developed by this stage in the film noir cycle, as is the theme of the ineffective marriage, which is fully played out between Bergman and Rains. 

Gaslight (1944)

Gaslight (1944) is an historical psychological and ever topical film noir drama by George Cukor, starring Ingrid Bergman, and based on a play by writer Patrick Hamilton.

While an engaging and massively popular item of historical drama, Gaslight (1944) is probably most remarkable as a cultural point of reference for the denominalisation of its title — to become the term 'gaslighting' — an aspect of psychological abuse generally within couples such as this — an abusive and controlling male.

To serve it its proper definition and coinage, gaslighting proper is a form of psychological abuse in which a person or group causes someone to question their own sanity, memories, or perception of reality. And this is, to quote the film's period poster: (the) strange drama of a captive sweetheart!

People who experience gaslighting will feel confused, anxious, or as though they cannot trust themselves, exactly as Ingrid Bergman portrays in this movie.