Gilda (1946)

Gilda (1946) is a classic film noir love triangle murder mystery directed by Charles Vidor, which in many ways represents the fantastical apogee of the noir style with its romantic mystery, intense and strange relationships, and its obsessive characters, unsure of themselves in the mazes of deceit, crime and love in which they find themselves.

Gilda is less of a love story than many a similar film noir from the era, and in fact its characters often talks of hate. 

The star of the film is the gloriously cinematic Rita Hayworth in the title role, perhaps one of her best ever roles, and certainly one in which she seems to powerfully upstage and out-perform everyone around her.

The Dark Past (1948)

The Dark Past (1948) is one of several films noir which opens with the aerial shot of the city, and an earnest voice over describing the existential experience of the urban life, the technological alienation which is suggestive of an architectural emptiness, a nihilism even, akin to crime in its freedom.

As Side Street seems to open with the message that any one of us may be the day's murder victim as much as they may be that murder's suspect.

The Dark Past takes the more traditional Mark Hellinger informed attitude that this is the naked city, and that it's like a jungle sometimes, and this is our framing, the real life city.

William Holden plays mean as hell psychopath and killer Al Walker, a film noir apogee and the defining casting action of a style which elevated to central protagonist the idea of villain as narrative prime mover.

A Bullet for Joey (1955)

The curious late-cycle film noir gangster-spy picture A Bullet for Joey (1955) unites the two stars Edward G. Robinson and George Raft,  who had previously been paired in Raoul Walsh's Manpower (1941).

Edward G. Robinson was at ease in film noir, and able to play good guy roles, which he often did with pipe-wielding authority, and out and out villains. 

George Raft in A Bullet For Joey plays the hoodlum figure, working here to kidnap a nuclear scientist, with Peter van Eyck as the true ring-leader.

Comparing it to Illegal (1955), also with Robinson and by director Lewis Allen, there is slightly less in terms of dark city noir qualities, paranoia, and psychological damage.

In Montreal, a police inspector (Edward G. Robinson) uncovers piece by piece a plan to kidnap a nuclear physicist. American mobsters, foreign spies and a blonde seductress are all involved in this rather staid caper.

Shout out, however, to monkeys in film noir.