To Be Or Not To Be (1942)

To Be Or Not To Be (1942) is not a film noir but as it is a theatreland mistaken identity German occupation of Poland romantic satire black comedy caper about the Holocaust, Nazism and Adolf Hitler and as such it is destined to feature on the classic film noir website, and though with little pedigree, wenn es überhaupt etwas ist, dann ist es kein Film Noir!

A comedy and as comedy does not age well of all the products and causes of the works of Hollywood, and of the few directors of the era that have no feet nor fingertips in film noir, Ernst Lubistch has no feet nor fingertips, non in film noir non, none.

An endless matinée, a film that works to eternity, one of the Hitler films and hard to conceive of in light of how magnificent it must be to portray the fascist in film, and there is film noir style, because if the shooting and the price of black and white, relax there is very little.

The Big Shot (1942)

The Big Shot (1942) is a Warner Bros. three-time-loser prison break couple-on-the-run innocent-man-convicted heist and gangland crime film noir thriller with Humphrey Bogart as the sympathetic gangster mob boss hero and Irene Manning as the woman he loves.

As any canon of work relies on trope and recognition, trope and repetition, all of which should be traceable back into the originating myths of its society, here is an archetypal late 1930s tale of motor madness, criminal expression, and the determination to go straight.

The latter is one of the greatest themes of the era. There were men who were innocent caught up in crime, there were veterans returning from the moral order of war to the confused criminal urban environments, and there were the charismatic guilty, who try as they might, could not avoid crime.

Dust Be My Destiny (1939)

Dust Be My Destiny (1939) is an innocent-man-jailed moral drifter narrative prison farm social state of the US couple on the run drama and romance proto noir which expresses noir moments and captures noir sentiment, as it bums across the states in various wagons and train carriages, always expressive of the idea that love will out.

Dust Be My Destiny (1939) is beautifully staged expression of what America sought most for itself, the idea of what it was set to become, its deepest anxieties about morality expressed in individual and romantic action from John Garfield, largely.

Black Friday (1940)

Black Friday (1940) is a brain transplant crime movie from the nascent moments of horror cinema as an as of yet undefined genre, and it is a film that shared some thematic and technical elements with the emerging film noir style.

With no monster as such to boast of and little in the way of a full mad scientist trope Black Friday does imply the crime genre full on in its fantastic progress to a sane conclusion.

Excuses for maddened acting and raw death row fun combine realities which could only in essence be explored in 1940, with no fully developed tropes fully recovered and broadcast in the cinemas, trope combination produced no end of experimental forays into what could have been.

The brain transplant movie genre emerged during a period no doubt of fascination with medical advancements and the exploration of the human psyche in cinema.