The Fountainhead (1949)

The Fountainhead (1949) is an Ayn Rand adaptation and scripted hyper-melodramatic didactic economics and social science charged pre-post modern pre-relativist objetivist and more than just a little film noir tinged melodrama of rags to riches UnAmercian Dream-style semi-speculative cross class dedication to art and architectural and individualistic vision unromantic romance set-up with its no promises and no obligations ultar-objectivist marriages alternate reality white suprematic media manipulation and propagandist anarcho-capitalist post-communist anti-communist media demagogue public opinion forming artisitic vindication of terrorism in the name of individualism impotent platonic-erotic love triangle drama directed by King Vidor and starring Patricia Neal, Gary Cooper, Raymond Massey, Kent Smith, Henry Hull, Moroni Olsen und Ray Collins, yah, Ray Collins is in this film produced by Henry Blanke.

49th Parallel (1941)

49th Parallel (1941) is a wartime hunted-man-narrative adventure road movie-style Nazi espionage chase propaganda thriller, in which a World War II U-boat crew are stranded in northern Canada, and to avoid internment, they must make their way to the border and get into the still-neutral U.S

While not under any circumstance a film noir and containing nothing within its narratives nor stylings which might help classify it or tend it towards discussing in the film noir for a of our own reflective times, 49th Parallel (1941) does depend on themes of espionage and manhunting , while also and most curiously profiling Nazis as the protagonists.

This is an effective narrative route, for the large part because Powell and Pressburger did not make films which heavily patronised, satirised, demonised and ridiculed the Third Reichers of the early 1940s. 

The Woman in the Window (1945)

It’s plastered on thick.   

Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) opens with Edward G. Robinson giving a college lecture, while behind him the words SIGMUND FREUD are written on a blackboard.  

If only he had turned to read that board himself.  

Ten minutes later Joan Bennett, playing the strange femme fatale of the title, turns up in a see-through blouse, and asks him to her apartment to see her etchings. 

That would be enough for many pictures, but in terms of the psychological goodies of film noir, The Woman in the Window probably has it in greater quantities than any other movie of the era.

The story is as fine a descent as featured in any film noir.  After psychology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) sends his wife and two children off on vacation, he sees a striking oil portrait of Alice Reed played by Joan Bennett in a storefront window.

Later, he meets the subject of the portrait, who is standing near the painting watching people gaze at it. Reed convinces Wanley to join her for drink, and thereafter there's murder, shootouts, clues, crime scenes and comic dialogues ... culminating in one of the greatest story-telling cliches of all time.