The Shop at Sly Corner (1947)

The Shop at Sly Corner (1949) is a lightweight Limey mystery film noir with a pleasant historical creep factor and an antiques business setting, featuring a psychopathic Pinkie-like young shop boy on a noir rise to power over the mild mannered walrus faced character actor stylings of Oscar Homoloka

The Shop at Sly Corner is based on a play by Edward Percy, a Conservative MP, which debuted in London in May 1945 and received positive reviews, with Variety praising it as "good theatre." 

The play enjoyed a successful two-year run in London, generating a significant profit for its investors after an initial production cost of just $12,000. 

Trapped (1949)

Trapped (1949) is counterfeiting undercover cop documentary style cop procedural noir from the absolute height of the classic film noir era.

Directed by Richard Fleischer film noir Trapped (1949) gained historical importance due to its restoration and rediscovery in later years. 

The film's significance lies in various aspects, including its place in the film noir genre, its unique production history, and the restoration efforts that brought it back into the spotlight.

Trapped (1949), a semi-documentary crime thriller film noir story, weaves a narrative tapestry that echoes the shadows of film noir, with intriguing parallels and deviations from its genre counterparts. Directed by Richard Fleischer, the film thrusts counterfeiters against Secret Service agents, a thematic echo of the acclaimed semi-doc T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947). 

However, Trapped takes daring strides in new and unexpected directions.

Hollow Triumph (1948)

Hollow Triumph (1948), which is also known as The Scar, and sometimes also by its working title The Man Who Murdered Himself, is a full on fantastical and fun full-fat film noir classic crime film directed by Steve Sekely starring Paul Henreid, Joan Bennett and Leslie Brooks. 

It was released by Eagle-Lion Films, based on the 1946 novel of the same title written by Murray Forbes.

It's everything high noir should be — a story of hardened criminality, deceit, weird and fantastical problems and situations, ambiguity, pursuit, fate, twists and doomed and destructive love affairs — it's incredible what can be packed into this 83 minute ride.

The Chase (1946)

The opening shot of The Chase (1946) is straight out of a mad god's dictionary of crazy Americana —  a burger being flipped, watched by a hungry ex-military man.

This is Chuck Scott, hapless heel about town and nervous pill-popper, a guy scarred into insecurity and down on his luck as a result of World War II.

And The Chase is not quite what you suspect. It's firmly film noir because of the psychology and the dream like quality of much of the story. 

Watch out for spoilers from this point on, because the dreamlike results of PTSD, which is what is being suggested in this film, make for a mad and paranoid set of circumstances.

The Big Combo (1955)

The walls and floors are streaked in shadows and there's a noisy boxing match roaring in the city.

Behind the scenes, a girl is pursued down darkly expressionist corridors, with only the self-gratified roar of the crowd as backdrop.

As The Big Combo starts we’re right in there at the heart of the caper, although the real story of The Big Combo is that of Cornel Wilde’s cop, and his obsession with catching the cooly menacing crime lord, Mr Brown, played brilliantly by Richard Conte.

To fulfil its film noir promise, The Big Combo is also hot with slick dialogue, the sort they just don't write no more:

Joe McClure: I guess I'm getting too old to handle a gun.

Mr. Brown: Yeah, maybe you're just getting too old, Joe.