A Place In The Sun (1951)

A Place In The Sun (1951) is a rich and poor love and melodrama classic American tragedy American Tragedy adaptation corporate America family drifter lousy fiancée tortured young man marital fear and unwanted pregnancy fear murder or not quite murder film noir starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, in which a poor boy gets a job from his rich uncle and ends up falling in love twice, and not coping, and this is directed by George Stevens and is a great Oscar winner, a great, great Oscar winner.

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.

Ruthless (1948)

Ruthless (1948) is a flashback romance rags and riches family fortune and misfortune corporate crime melodrama film noir by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Martha Vickers, Zachary Scott, Louise Hayward, Sydney Greenstreet, Raymond Burr and Dennis Hoey.

Edgar G. Ulmer's Ruthless (1948) stands as a merciless anatomy of social ambition and spiritual bankruptcy, constructed with the formal ingenuity of a master denied the budgets and acclaim he deserved.

Abandoned (1949)

Abandoned (1949) is a journalism and media baby-adoption-ring female seeker hero film noir from high into the classic years of all out full fat noir, remaining a mean wittaw crime flick that slithers through the back alleys of corruption like a grifter on the lam. 

It’s got all the dirty fingerprints of a real noir—shadows thick as cigarette smoke, dames in trouble, and heels looking to make a fast buck off somebody else's misery.

It kicks off when Paula Considine (Gale Storm) hits Los Angeles looking for her missing sister. The cops? They don’t care. But a wisecracking newshound named Mark Sitko (Dennis O’Keefe) smells a rat, and soon they’re knee-deep in a baby-smuggling racket run by a smooth operator with ice in his veins, played by the ever-slick Raymond Burr. 

He’s got an adoption scam so tight it squeaks, selling newborns like hot merchandise, and anyone who gets in his way winds up floating face-down in the Los Angeles River.

Station West (1948)

Station West (1948) is a private eye cynical male lead morally ambiguous rugged frontier Western tale of deceit, violence and heists, and is likely a star case of the strangely elusive and debatable category that the cineastes and afficionados refer to as film noir Western, or Western film noir.

Snappy, moody and splashing a wagon load of Sedona scenery, Station West is an earnest and honest item of op class Americana from the days when film noir and westerns were the absolute staples of 

Sidney Lanfield, director, is not best known for film noir although he did direct the 1939 The Hound of the Baskervilles, a classic of more than just one canon, and comedy and romance with a little bit of musical might describe his work. The closest effort to a spy film within his range might well have been The Lady Has Plans (1942), a comedy spy thriller with Ray Milland and Paulette Goddard.

Rear Window (1954)

Rear Window (1954) is a classic Alfred Hitchcock suspense and murder mystery voyeur noir film cineaste's dream romantic drama about marriage, and one man's ability to face the prospect, while weirding a large camera at a window, from which he sees people, and yet no person appears to see him.

The dream of murder commences as James Stewart's character photographer Jeff appears to piece together something far too gruesome to be shown on screen, including the hack sawing of a woman's body.

His Kind of Woman (1951)

His Kind of Woman (1951) is a Howard Hughes produced adventure comedy face transplant gambler noir with both light and heavy touches and an array of almost spoofily delivered scenes and lines which might have been suggestive of noir satire were it not for Howard Hughes failing movie policies, which always created slightly aberrant Hollywoodish features.

The story of His Kind of Woman (1951) tells of how a deported gangster's plan to re-enter the USA involves skulduggery at a Mexican resort, and gambler Dan Milner is caught in the middle. The end goal is a rather unspecified face transplant operation a variety of post-Nazi science that blends into the Hollywood fantasies of the day, unspoken and feared.

Borderline (1950)

Borderline (1950) is an undercover female cop narcotic smuggling romantic copper couple on the run chase caper noir starring Fred MacMurray and Claire Trevor as undercover narcotic cops on the job in Mexico, unaware that each of the other is an undercover narcotic cop on the job in Mexico.

A gentle noir, with no profound moments of existential threat, anxiety, peril nor paranoia, Borderline (1950) is an undecided film noir, capering with the caper format at times and nudging on occasion into comedy, especially as it adopts and parades a standard series of idle Mexicana, example in the made up typecast stereo of the bumbling sombrero and the old "Si senor" routine, which blocks out the light at every turn in this cheapish escapade.

Crime Of Passion (1957)

Crime Of Passion (1957) is a cops in suburbia story of female subjugation by the American Dream, and the story of how one career woman in love regrets her decision to quit her job in the media and become a housewife.

Many of the favourite flavours of noir are evident in a curiously uncorrupted and happy cop shop whereas the subtle rot of suburban morality that is often unsubtly recorded in film noir is placed on a slow burn beneath the lot of this movie.

The men are the men and the women are the women in this vision of 1950s USA, and most especially of all this is a noir of suburbia, a tale of the middle classes and the stifling inability of the new American Dream to cope with any abnormality in the moral and gender relations of the day.

Walk A Crooked Mile (1948)

Walk A Crooked Mile (1948) is a red scare domestic espionage thriller paranoia film noir which presents in an exciting and effective manner, the values and festivities pertaining to the rise of anti-Communist sentiment in post-war America.

This iteration of the hunt for the devil's doctrine itself and was presented around the first time that the widespread corrupting influences of socialism and its violent social counterparts became a public concern via the medium of public discussion.

Depending on where you are in noir the communists can be anything at all, from plain criminal mooks to dark bearded Victorian villains, or even the person next to you on the bus, the most innocent looking citizens of all. There are also the corporate types, the communists of ideology and those who have infiltrated our organisations and even our government. All of it is here, and made up for the screen.

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.

Raw Deal (1948)

Raw Deal (1948) is a classic of on the lam noir film-making starring Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt.

Prison convict Joe Sullivan has not only taken the fall for an unspecified crime, but he sports the classic film noir overcoat in this film, and runs desperately from hideout to hideout, trekking down the West Coast of the USA on a collision course with revenge.

Best of all, his run is made with two women at his side, Pat and Ann, dames established from the off as the good and bad side of femininity, both of whom are of course sweet on him, in their separate ways.

Pat is the more traditional gangster's moll, who helps Joe with the breakout, and is as tough as the leather which this film noir is made from; contrasted with Ann, the good gal who is her foil and love rival, and is actually Joe's case-worker, who has against her own will fallen for the convict.

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

The Blue Gardenia (1953), by Fritz Lang, is a cynical take on how the press handles brutal murder cases. 

Richard Conte is the slick as whistle reporter, determined to prove that the press has more might than the police, and is willing to use his position as the city's ace reporter in order to solve the murder.

Proof, if more were needed, that the mainstream home of any social comment in the 1940s and 1950s could be found in film noir. 

Indeed, the power of the press is as significant as the other beneath-the-surface aspects of the story; and this includes the idea of a woman being drunk equating to some kind of sexual consent.

The Blue Gardenia is the first part of what might be sometimes known as Fritz Lang's 'newspaper noir' trilogy, which also includes While The City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

The drunkenness of the pretty young woman played by Anne Baxter in The Blue Gardenia is almost as a form of drink-spiking. Raymond Burr, the womanising press artist at the centre of the tale, is quick to fling a few of his favourite hard beverages down her throat; the Polynesian Pearl Diver, it's called.

She drinks one, she drinks two, and the guzzling with gusto turns sour and a murder is committed.

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.