Crossfire (1947)

Crossfire (1947) is a classic film noir returning veteran anti-Semitic military procedural Hollywood Ten produced and directed murder chase thriller with Roberts Ryan, Young and Mitchum, in a night-long low-budget detection and paranoia drama.

Known and loved as a classic of its kind, Crossfire (1947) is best known as being a fore-runner to the justices of HUAC and features many heavily Communised individuals including actors, writer, director and producers, and in fact bearing that in mind it is not surprising that this red-fest of socialist freedom and civic principles in the face of any kind of incipient fascism was always going to be a McCarthy favourite. The film in fact premiered at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City on July 22, 1947 and only a few months later producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), becoming part of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.

Secret Agent (1936)

Secret Agent (1936) is a wacky and serious by turns British historical continental espionage thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, and one able to pull a rather outré punch with its oddity, hilarity, dark subject matter and casual approach to high European super spy-work.

Either way the debonair humour and sophisticated violence and random fantasy involved in this type of fancy spy work is going at some point in the future, and maybe after being re-emphasised by Hitchcock in his masterpiece North By Northwest (1959) be reminiscent of the British Bond, and indeed if you were to ever ask who might have been the first British actor to play such a thing, the answer may well be that it is John Gielgud.

That is correct. Gielgud as Bond. He even does the Mrs Female Spy only one bed for Mr and Mrs Bond in a hotel room routine, so why not.

They Won't Believe Me (1947)

They Won't Believe Me (1947) is a note-perfect melodramatic film noir from the later 1940s.

Within the paranoid marriages of the era, there was according to the classic film noir canon, a good deal of secrecy, murder, and madness. 

Given the amount of times that film noir discusses such marriages, and their eerie contents, one wonders what was happening to men and women in that decade.

It is perhaps as if the women were coming out of the darkness and forging a place for themselves in the future homes and relationships of the 1950s, and beyond. In the 1940s marriages were fearful and secret places, where women remained prisoners in mysterious gilded cages.