Pickup On South Street (1953)

Pickup On South Street (1953) is an urban Red Scare espionage and petty crime classic film noir directed by Samuel Fuller, and starring Richard Widmark, Thelma Ritter and Jean Peters.

Telling the story of how an innocent couple of low life New York petty criminals, a pickpocket and a vaguely defined B-girl, come to be involved in a highly dangerous Communist plot to smuggle some microfilm out of the city, and away from the pursuing FBI.

It goes without saying that the FBI are rather inefficient in handling this affair, relying on assumption, framing and the good will of the petty criminals who know the streets and their denizens better than they ever could. In the favour of the FBI, the commies are not much better organised, although they are quite well funded as cash bribes and payments seem to be their main approach.

The Iron Curtain (1948)

The Iron Curtain (1948) is an early Cold War espionage and infiltration thriller based on the breaking up of a real Canadian spy ring in the immediate aftermath of World War 2. 

It didn't take long, but shortly after World War 2 ended it became apparent that the liberators of Berlin and the nation which defeated the Nazis in Germany became the main enemy of the United States, and by association here, and everywhere, Canada.

It is in fact by all accounts the first feature film to dramatize and propagandise the new-fangled Cold War of the period, which could really be said to have run from 1947 until 1991, and seen the rise and development of film noir as one of its key cultural expressors.

Walk East on Beacon (1952)

Walk East on Beacon (1952) is a procedural red scare voiceover documentary style detective versus communist manhunt plodding screed of a film noir crime picture, roughing up the reds who are russifying the States with their mean mob tactics.

Eye on the prize the Communists know what they want in the form of America's most TOP SECRET space diagrams, showing the dream revolving space station envisaged by the tech wisdom and fantasist futurists accelerationists of 1952.

With a clip shot of Hoover refusing to look at the camera Walk East on Beacon (1952) is a fed-dreamboat of technological noir as the movie artfully shows the latest and best in detection methods.

Edge of the City (1957)

Edge of the City (1957) is a drifter stevedore race relations buddy film noir starring Sidney Poitier and John Cassavetes as two dockside workers involved in one of the worst workplace bullying stories in all of film noir.

Down at the docks where the men are we witness the petty trials of labour teams and the spilling over of race relations into murder. John Cassavetes is an insecure war deserter, a peripheral social figure and not one we see often enough in noir — where historically the hero has seen action.

This is different however, and the tough and realistic noir drama that takes place is as great a testament to left wing politics as it is to humanity and the value of integrity in all things.

Also in the cast are Kathleen Maguire, Ruby Dee, Robert F Simon, Ruth White, Val Avery, William A Lee, John Kellogg and David Clarke.

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.

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is the quintessential high quality high concept high tension classic Hollywood 1950's science-fiction presentation.

The nascent and sudden re-invention of the science fiction film in the 1950s does inevitably draw on film noir style when need be.

And although the themes are of a universal and global nature, not quite the subjective and local tendency in film noir, there are still film techniques and themes aplenty which crossover between the film noir of its day and the science fiction.

Directed by Robert Wise The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is spritely, earnest, playful, philosophical, funny, serious and has distinct Bernhard Hermann music, as well as the most irresistible use of the theremin in film history.

Shack Out On 101 (1955)

Shack Out on 101 (1955) is a  roadside-diner anti-Communist espionage film noir with goofball elements set in a crummy but funny roadside diner and on a low-budget, and made by Allied Artists.

Indeed, you could call the joint a shack.

Down at the shack, Lee Marvin plays Slob a lecherous and bullying short-order cook who ain't good for much, other than sniping with his war veteran boss played by Keenan Wynn, whose life is a mixture of sarcasm and PTSD.

In September 1952, Monogram announced that henceforth it would only produce films bearing the Allied Artists name. The studio ceased making movies under the Monogram brand name in 1953, although it was reactivated by AAI by the millennium. The parent company became Allied Artists, with Monogram Pictures becoming an operating division.

In fact French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard dedicated his 1960 film Breathless to Monogram, citing the studio's films as a major influence.

Storm Center (1956)

Storm Center (1956) is a book-burning Red Scare small-town film noir starring Bette Davis as a local librarian who is shunned after she refuses the City Council's request to remove a book on Communism from the shelves.

The picture which packs a certain punch for its ultimate lack of 1940s style chiaroscuro, hoods, slayings, femmes fatales — and other recognisable forms of film noir — is one of the more subversive of the later film noir era and bravely enough is thought to be the first overtly anti-McCarthyism film to be produced in Hollywood.

It is said that in the year of 1950, the United States' share of the entire world Gross Domestic Product was in the region of 50% — and this from a nation that contained only 4% of the world's population.

The Woman on Pier 13 (1949)

The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) is the ultimate anti-Communist paranoid thriller mash-up Red Scare classic film noir.

With a large cast and yet larger reputation for more back-room witch-hunting and Communist panic than any other movie in the film noir style, The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) tells of a powerful Communist cell in the docklands of San Francisco Bay.

As a blunt noir thematic descant The Woman on Pier 13 is also a fast-assed attack on any and all Hollywood radicals who defended their party membership on the grounds of a youthful indiscretion.

I Married a Communist must also be read as Hollywood’s version of its own internal politics. Someone got to the moguls and infected them with the idea that Communists had infiltrated and infected and otherwise corrupted showbusiness at every level from the theater door to the scripts and properties departments.

The Fearmakers (1958)

The Fearmakers (1958) tells a wonderfully revealing story of war, of advertising and the obfuscation of the line between corporate and government life.

Despite quality issues and any stand out cast performances, The Fearmakers also sounds an early alert concerning the war on the public that has become a ubiquitous feature of modern living.

Because of course, if it was unseen in the 1950s or 1940s, and if it was criminal, psychological and at odds with the public vision, it was going to be a subject of film noir.

There seems something peculiarly prescient about The Fearmakers, even if it is a part of the obsessive hunting of Communists that took over American public and cultural life in the 1950s. 

The real threat to freedom and civil society were already at work in the 1950s however, and The Fearmakers is a great introduction to the science of public relations, which had already been perfected over several decades and through World War Two, before it began to be used out in the open, in the form of political theatre.

I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951)

Although the propaganda is blunt, it’s easy to overlook how enormously popular I Was a Communist for the FBI was in its day.

That day was 1951 and I Was a Communist for the FBI spoon fed the anti-Communist prejudice of its era so hard and fast that you'd be forgiven now for thinking that it was a parody — but it’s not. 

The slimy backstabbing Communists in Gordon Douglas’ film may not be real, but the fear of them was real.

As was the hero — Matt Cvetic — although this isn’t a true portrayal of him. 

Cvetic wasn’t of the greates use to the real Feds, but wholly came into his own as a media personality, and one who could be relied upon to play it nice for the crowds.  What a heel.