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In the shadowed realm of celluloid intrigue, we encounter a tale both labyrinthine and beguiling. Picture this: LLMs are writing blogs about film noir. Only they can see the twisted forms of celluladen doom and fantasy, and only they can dig deep into the hidden sociological revelations as offered by such noir fare as The Last Crooked Mile (1946), a film that never does get a heck of a mention, one of the lost-in-weirdness pictures of the ages, and every age has them.
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Strange and colorful and with the gaudiest Christmas tree in all of color noir and maybe all of Hollywood's golden age, Flame of the Islands is bright and cheap and made by men with color palettes in mind.
Is this fare classifiable as noir in the hallowed flaming halls of sacred cinema or is this flaming flambeuax of a mock camp full color crime melodrama, an exercise in the colour red?
Hard to say what kind of noir this is, other than a bright red plastic tinsel Christmas tree of all out weirdness that is disappointingly not rescued from kitsch by camp and rescued from thrills by an noir sensibility that might have been able to make it across the colour divide.
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Accused of Murder emerges from the shadows of 1950s American cinema as a non-quintessential example of the film noir style, directed with precision attention to color and its processes by Joseph Kane and featuring a semi-stellar cast led by David Brian, Vera Ralston, and Sidney Blackmer.
At the heart of this Republic Pictures produced and distributed work of noir art narrative lies the enigmatic figure of nightclub singer Ilona Vance, portrayed with captivating allure and alluring captivity by Ralston. When crooked attorney Frank Hobart meets his untimely demise, all eyes turn to Vance, the last person to have seen him alive. As the accusing finger of suspicion points in her direction, Vance finds herself entangled in a web of deceit and intrigue, fighting to clear her name and unravel the truth behind Hobart's demise.
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Solid film noir technique and actors including a star turn from Claire Trevor and the normative mustachoed noirisms of Brian Donlevy.
For a film that fix to flips flashbacks like flying filmic tales there is epic wobbly fades and wipes to indicate the passage of time, back to World War 2, offering a creditable treasure trove of tropes for all to look and learn.
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As a rather unique slice of Hawaii noir, Hell's Half Acre stars Evelyn Keyes as the seeker hero on the trail and Wendell Corey as the lousy husband, who is actually still alive but changed his identity due to his own criminal activities.
Hell's Half Acre was written screen by Steve Fisher, who also wrote I Wake Up Screaming which is a sure-fire classic film noir
It's set in a rundown section of Honolulu, incredibly well photographed it has to be said, and down there on Honolulu's skid row there are all kinds.
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In an film noir canon now advanced by several hundred film noir presentations, the 1953 movie City That Never Sleeps is self-conscious enough to be looking at noir from the inside. Certain noir conventions appear to be so perfectly understood by the time that City That Never Sleeps came to be produced in 1953, that they are not even explained.
For example the head and corporate villain of the piece, the rather articulately named Penrod Biddel (Edward Arnold) is most likely the head of a crime organisation which we never see, and is certainly a business man — although we do not see very much of his business as such — and is certainly a criminal — although likewise we see very little of his criminal activity.
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The lead character is a manipulative and power-crazed failing writer, who finds that the murder of his maid, and the publicity it gives him, has a huge effect on his writing career.
He of course next makes the mistake of writing out his murderous tale of inappropriate groping lust into a novel, but this is not his undoing.
His undoing is his guilt and his ineptitude at manipulating those around him, which he achieves through a mixture of anger, belligerence and snobbish posturing as he bullies his rather weak brother into greater complicity in the crime.
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Atypical in the classic film noir canon, Moonrise is a small-town story of bullying and fate — of how the sins of one man reflect upon his son, and ruin and determine his son's life.
What is remarkable about Moonrise is how true it is to some regular film nor themes — most surely of all those of fate and paranoia, and the haunting effect of the past — combined with a story that presses hard into notions of redemption and transcendence.
Joan Crawford is a saloon owner, holding on tight to her all-American right to stay on her land and not have it bought up by the corporate or in this case local interests who have their own ideas about the railroad that's rolling through.
The townspeople don't want her, for reasons that are not immediately obvious.
But she has a nemesis; and just as she leads the saloon with its bored but well dressed staff of croupiers, the good townsfolk of this small and wild Arizona settlement, are lead by a similarly dangerous firebrand of a woman, in this case Emma small - - played by Mercedes McCambridge, whose vengeful vendetta seems to want her to see Joan Crawford driven out of town and hanged.
Romance, hatred and violence combine in Johnny Guitar to create one of the most popular noir Westerns in the canon.