X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) is a classic cosmic horror psychedelic parody Roger Corman mad scientist acid casualty and addiction groovy lounge music and experimental sound masterpiece of comedy terror and inverted American dream Vegas and sideshow apocalyptic guignol Lovecraftian scientific hubris Pathécolor pulp science fiction horror film produced and directed by Roger Corman, from a script by Ray Russell and Robert Dillon, and starring Ray Milland as a scientist who develops a method to extend the range of his vision, which results in unexpected complications, with Don Rickles, Diana Van der Vlis and veteran character actor Morris Ankrum.

Golden Earrings (1947)

Golden Earrings (1947) is an immediatley post-war wartime Romany-gypsy adventure transformation prisoner of war with shades of screwball comedy in the shape of a misbehaving wild sexpot gypsy espionage kind of backdrop infused film noir flashback but no voiceover man on the run and behind enemy lines Eurowaldian soundtage based romancer flick about a man and a 'gypsy' who is at odds with English morality, obviously, and who drives a cliched caravan through Nazi Germany with the SS in cold pursuit, ultimately creating a fusion genre that could be described by the phrase serious comedy, and starring Ray Milland and Marlene Dietrich, with Murvyn Vye, Bruce Lester and Dennis Hoey.

A Man Alone (1955)

Übrigens ist er nicht in der Ray-Milland-Saison enthalten.

A Man Alone (1955) is a Ray Milland directed and starring revenge framed man adventure romance angry mob and innocent man wrongly accused father down with a fever nobody's blamin you can make up your own mind, my word against his dangerous man noir inflected gunman film western directed by and starring Ray Milland as Wes Steele, Mary Murphy as Nadine Corrigan, Ward Bond as Sheriff Gil Corrigan, Raymond Burr as Stanley, Arthur Space as Doctor Mason, Lee Van Cleef as Clanton and Alan Hale as Acting Sheriff Jim Anderson.

Something to Live For (1952)

The Ray Milland season continues with a languid, almost metaphysical hesitation, like a thought groping its way through fog

Something to Live For (1952) is an alcoholic uncommunicative male melodrama romance and extramarital affair lousy husband Christmas-based suburban versus the ratted out city of advertising and Americana with its multiple booze options and constant idiotic nagging party scenarios, starring Ray Milland and Joan Fontaine, as the fated foetid couple at large battling the booze against a stable marital backstop of two young boys and the perfected wife=figure, as played by Teresa Wright

A Life of Her Own (1950)

The Ray Milland season does not advance so much as unfold — temporally, tentatively, beautifully. Its path is all digression and delay, yet within that slow meander there trembles a strange coherence, the whisper of a destination it cannot name.

A Life of Her Own (1950) is a George Cukor woman's picture young model from Kansas trying to make it big in New York, doomed romance and suicide driven depression discussing psychological critique lousy husband melodrama starring Lana Turner and Ray Milland, Louis Calhern and Ann Dvorak, Jean Hagen and Phyllis Kirk.

Dial M For Murder (1954)

The Ray Milland Season Hitchcock Highlight unfolds without haste —  it drifts — not lost, but unanchored — tracing arabesques through the medium of noir

Dial M For Murder (1954) is an Alfred Hitchcock Technicolor dual-strip polarised 3D but always subsequently seen in 2D lousy husband telephone-noir based-on-a play home invasion murder and police and detective procedural intriguer starring Grace Kelly, Ray Milland, Robert Cummings, Anthony Dawson and John Williams.

Circle of Danger (1951)

The Ray Milland Season Unfolds Without Haste

Circle of Danger (1951) is an American in Britain post-WW2 investigative mystery Limey home nations road movie of mystery with locale-driven shooting in London, Wales and in the Highlands, making a virtue of Patricia Roc's infectious smile and Ray Milland's hatted and haunted pillar to post look as he uncovers a vaguely understandable plot that I am not sure now after two viewings — has ever been explained. 

The circle itself, the circle of danger, the rotunda of peril, is specifically not quite as convoluted as it might otherwise be in a film noir. 

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). 

The Thief (1952)

The Ray Milland Season dilates in time, endures with fascination. 

The Thief (1952) is a non-verbal one of a kind atomic age location-shot nuclear secrets classic Ray Milland and Russell Rouse film noir, both innovative and inventive, curious and classic, telling the engrossingly spun paranoid tale of one man's turning Communist spy and his discovery and having to go on the run, with escape and capture fantasy played out across New York, in some most famously shot locals and corners.

So Evil My Love (1948)

So Evil My Love (1948) is a gaslighting and bullying historical art-forgery and murder paranoid woman fog based faux-gothique period noir multi lousy-husband social and society mix of madness, poison, Caribbean cures, old time maritime malaria, and gaslight, was gaslight ever mentioned. Gaslight.

The women's movies of film noir, the overlapping themes of gaslighting men and paranoid women, and old houses and a stripped back gothic that retains none of the deep psychology but has everyone in the extremist of states all of the time, these women's movies are troped to the core with such material as is found in So Evil My Love (1948).

The Glass Key (1935)

The Glass Key (1935) is an underworld of politics and crime thriller that is not film noir but well may be a proto-noir, but is an adaptation of a seminal Dashiell Hammett novel, later remade into a more lavish effort in 1942.

In the dimly lit chambers of literary discourse, where the flicker of candle flames dances upon the parchment, let us embark upon a journey through the labyrinthine corridors of this narrative. 

The tale that unfolds before us, like the intricate workings of a Victorian pocket watch, neither wears the gilded mask of merriment nor the embroidered cloak of frivolity. Nay, it treads the murky path of shadows and secrets, where the echoes of footsteps linger long after the last page is turned.

Our protagonist, Ned Beaumont, emerges from the fog of obscurity—a man of enigmatic countenance, his features etched by the chisel of fate. 

Alias Nick Beal (1947)

Alias Nick Beal (1947) is a fantasy-mystery film noir with occasionally spiritual overtones, which tries in its way to re-tell the Faust myth, setting it in the milieu of American state and domestic politics.

Although Thomas Mitchell receives third billing in Alias Nick Beal (1947), he is the central character, whose rather erratic journey we follow, as he discovers that politics is messier than he thought, and that simply wanting to clean up the city, is never going to be enough.

Supporting this journey are Ray Milland who plays the eponymous Nick Beal, who is in fact none other the Lucifer himself, at work on the city streets and in the salons of offices of 1940s America.

At the very least, the appearance of the devil in Faustian form, in a fedora and in the guise of Ray Milland, makes for a new and effective take on the film noir punishment and redemption motif. 

The Big Clock (1948)

The Big Clock (1948) a classy and classic film noir race against the clock movie starring Ray Milland, and Charles Laughton, is a fairly unique entry in the canon.

Ray Milland is a reporter in a news corporation, tasked with solving a complex situation of his own making, and mostly set in the ultra-high-modern offices of his employer.

This newspaper office is unlike any other in film noir. The more usual film noir newspaper offices are kinda drab and somewhat realistic, and may look like those featured in Fritz Lang's While The City Sleeps (1956). The publisher's offices in The Big Clock are as uber-modern as any of the period, and the sets throughout are fascinating.

The look is dynamic, and sharp, to match the technology which was booming, burgeoning in fact into the real life media corporations that would begin their march to world domination only a few years late, in the 1950s.

The Lost Weekend (1945)

The Lost Weekend (1945) by Billy Wilder, and starring Ray Milland as writer Don Birnam, and starring alcohol as itself, perfectly in character as a marvellous and demonic fixe-fatale, is a low-key and visionary tale of alcoholic failure, and as such uniquely emotional and modern, for the 1940s.

The Lost Weekend is also a landmark in film noir and a high station in Hollywood history, being among other things the winner of  a Best Picture Oscar . . . in fact The Best Picture Oscar, in fact, and there may be little more significant when assessing the history of one style, genre or cinema

This Best Picture Oscar was a deserved win for many reasons, and that included morality which always plays a part in this decision, each year, no matter what the style of picture.

It was a deserved win for the modernity and humanity of The Lost Weekend, which is a film that does not dazzle so much as invite the viewer on a slow and focused ride to the bottom. There is no complexity other than in the acting, and even the script does not veer, even when it surprises with its hidden bottles of rye and constant feeling of domestic and internal desperation.

The Lost Weekend is still a film noir however. Even though there is no murder, there is above all else a psychological horror which in cinematic terms could only find its feet in film noir in the 1940s.

Ministry of Fear (1944)

Ministry of Fear (1944) is an espionage dream Nazi spy thriller starring Ray Milland, presenting an almost surreal succession of events and clues as one man is sucked further into a murderous Nazi spy plot as he inadvertently receives something the enemy agents are after — in a cake which he wins at a bizarre midnight village fete.

The Nazis in Fritz Lang's film noir mid-war favourite Ministry of Fear aren't presented in the typical style of the day.

The Nazis in this film noir classic don't wear swastika armbands and nor do they make fascist speeches about the benefits of the Reich's new order, a sight common enough from other mid-War propaganda.

There were many films made about WWII, during WWII. The movie Nazis that made the most impact at the time were in the style of the pompous evil-doers of films like Sherlock Holmes And The Voice Of Terror (1942); or Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943).