My Six Convicts (1952)

My Six Convicts (1952) is an earnest prison reform noir drama movie from the very high water mark of the classic film noir era.

Yet maybe just floating upon that watermark does not mean your every film production is a classic, and most certainly of all, unlikely to be a classic of the film noir style.

What My Six Convicts (1952) does manage is a sympathetic-psychopathic portmanteau of movie moodiness with the nascent form of the movie madman being treated of as seriously as it could have been after just having undergone a fantastical 1940s of fun and fear, in which cod-psychoanalytic crime detection became 

The film kicks off with John Beal's arrival at the prison, tasked with trialing a psychological rehabilitation system for convicts. However, progress is slow until Millard Mitchell's seasoned safe-cracker takes a chance on the new doc.

Hangover Square (1945)

Hangover Square (1945) is a classic historically-set amnesia film noir about madness, genius, weakness and manipulation, starring Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell and George Sanders.

Add to this some further elements of police psychology, the perils of artistic genius and a clash of class, and there emerges one of the best thrillers of the decade, albeit bizarre with facial pulls from Cregar, super-dramatic music from Bernard Herrmann, one of the cinema's greatest ever composers.

That and a whole host of Cockney side-fun, which serves to pull focus on the murderous madness which is at the centre of the action.

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.

M (1951)

M (1951) is remake of Fritz Lang's 1931 classic of the same name, and does not disappoint as it condenses and updates the drama, taking it to the streets of Los Angeles, and offering up some great visuals of the Victorian area of Bunker Hill.

A significant amount had happened in the world and in cinema in the twenty years between the two films, and while the story is in essence exactly the same, the two worlds, that of Berlin in 1931 and Los Angeles in 1951, have little in common.

While Fritz Lang presented public and personal paranoia to the max in his 1931 masterpiece, neither are edged deep into the drama of the 1951 M, but it is otherwise an effective film.

There are stabs at public paranoia and criminal psychology, although both seem to be token efforts at times. The police procedural which returns an otherwise constantly roving camera to the quite corner of a soundstage on a fairly regular basis, is handled by Howard Da Silva, who plays the carefree cop, chewing his way from meeting to meeting, first with the city's mayor, and then with various psychologists, colleagues and villains.