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Haulage heel Steve Reynolds, played by Richard Dix, is a trucker guy who falls foul of a scheme that he uncovers from what seems like a series of accidents, and may in fact just be that, a series of accidents.
Indeed and for whatever reason, there are questions unanswered at the conclusion of this tale, possibly the greatest of these being why is this film called The Thirteenth Hour, and what is the thirteenth hour and what in fact is it the thirteenth hour of?
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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.
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Yet maybe just floating upon that watermark does not mean your every film production is a classic, and most certainly of all, unlikely to be a classic of the film noir style.
What My Six Convicts (1952) does manage is a sympathetic-psychopathic portmanteau of movie moodiness with the nascent form of the movie madman being treated of as seriously as it could have been after just having undergone a fantastical 1940s of fun and fear, in which cod-psychoanalytic crime detection became
The film kicks off with John Beal's arrival at the prison, tasked with trialing a psychological rehabilitation system for convicts. However, progress is slow until Millard Mitchell's seasoned safe-cracker takes a chance on the new doc.
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Definitely the target of workplace bullying as well as workplace sexual harassment from smug mug himself Scott Brady, undercover girl Alexis Smith is also a good cop in an embarrassingly male world, only a few years out of wartime and no years into the 1950s, it is going to be a place where a woman is going to be muscled into the film noir environment of the home, this is going to happen.
She's on the range but they want her in apron, and it takes a touch cookie like Alexis Smith to break this patriarchy right open.
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In some senses an outlier in the body of Alfred Hitchcock's own work, and not entirely styled in the mode of a more traditional or acceptable example of film noir, Spellbound does carry with it key noir themes of amnesia and psychoanalysis, and is as much a thriller as it is a psychological mystery.
Most of Spellbound's power comes as a romance story — always a strength with Alfred Hitchcock, who was as much a master of amour as he was of suspense.
Spellbound follows a psychoanalyst who falls in love with the new head of the Vermont hospital in which she works, only to find that he is an imposter suffering dissociative amnesia, and potentially, a murderer.
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G Men, one of the top-grossing films of 1935 was a shot at portraying crime successfully within the confines of the newly enforced Hayes Code, by creatively casting crime favourite James Cagney in a non-criminal role -- in this case supporting the law and maintaining the action by becoming a federal agent.
The supporting cast features Robert Armstrong and Barton MacLane and the surrounding tension arises from the fact that Cagney's character, Brick Davis changes sides and bides farewell to the mob boss who financed his education as a lawyer, to become a full on nark, a fed or what passed for it in the long-past and unarmed days of 1935.
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The action is based on an alleged real life plot to kill the President in 1861, and this historical fact of a possible assassination attempt on Lincoln gives the movie most of its power and interest.
Dick Powell is the star with the period hat and haircut who uses deduction and logic to find who on the train could be conspirators.
He is straight-up foiled at different times but manages to win the day even when the conspirators have caught him. For effect, the movie's action takes place mostly on the train with the old rocking-camera technique and some fun fights in the steam and in the various parts of the vehicle.
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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.
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Two of the best tropes include the wifelet seeker hero, a staple of the early genre; and the falsely accused heel. He's hapless too, and actually quite hatless for noir.
Although the hero of this noir - Tom J Quinn, played by the relatively obscure Don Castle - works with his feet. So hapless and hatless he rides to his fate, a film noir heel nonetheless, with the solid backing of a good woman.
He's a dancer and this is a film noir of shoes, a graspable premise, summed up as: Vaudeville dancer Tom Quinn (Castle) is convicted for murder after his shoe prints are found at the scene of the crime. His wife Ann (Knox) follows the trail of clues to the real killer.
