Suddenly (1954)

Suddenly (1954) is a presidential assassination Lewis Allen home invasion children in film noir classic film noir Frank Sinatra and Sterling Hayden small town crime suspense thriller, which is not only a good time, but a beautiful item of film nostalgia, noir history, cinematic escapism, and an all round document of mid fifties optimism, conservatism, paranoia, and social confidence.

Yeah this is a town in which the lil boys want to be police officers when they grow up. The truth was break America fairly soon, but for the time this suburban aspic is a gelatinous capturing of some of the best known American dream-style tropes, characters and idiomes en scene.

Terror in a Texas Town (1958)

Terror in a Texas Town (1958) is an extended flashback wild west whaler revenge tale of corruption and gun slinging oil grabbing landlordism and violence, created in the wake of the HUAC hearings which terrorised and attempted to sterilise and de-communise the media of the 1950s.

A low budget western with a deep moral message, Joseph H. Lewis’s Terror in a Texas Town (1958) is an underappreciated Western that defies many of the conventions typically associated with the genre. At first glance, it may seem to be yet another run-of-the-mill B-western, but beneath its low-budget exterior, the film raises deeply disturbing questions about justice, morality, and societal complicity.

Naked Alibi (1954)

Naked Alibi (1954) is a cop on the edge psycho killer chase thriller that endeavours to spill the ills of suburban America into the criminal wilds of Mexico, as an unhinged killer baker bridges the merciless and pointless gap between the normative strains of the American Dream and the animal flavours of the real world of criminal human agony.

The two tend to meet flatly in the face of the stylistically drowning form of mid 50s noir, when the residues of dramatised psychologically criminality, portrayed with such fun in the 1940s, turn to sour and serious and usually quite odd and unexplained abnormality, as the noir ideals begin to fade mid-decade.

Naked Alibi  (1954) stands as a testament to the enduring allure of film-noir, even as the genre evolved through the 1950s. The film brings together a trio that guarantees a noir masterpiece: Sterling Hayden, Gloria Grahame, and the shadowy ambiance of noir cinematography.

Crime Of Passion (1957)

Crime Of Passion (1957) is a cops in suburbia story of female subjugation by the American Dream, and the story of how one career woman in love regrets her decision to quit her job in the media and become a housewife.

Many of the favourite flavours of noir are evident in a curiously uncorrupted and happy cop shop whereas the subtle rot of suburban morality that is often unsubtly recorded in film noir is placed on a slow burn beneath the lot of this movie.

The men are the men and the women are the women in this vision of 1950s USA, and most especially of all this is a noir of suburbia, a tale of the middle classes and the stifling inability of the new American Dream to cope with any abnormality in the moral and gender relations of the day.

Manhandled (1949)

Manhandled (1949) is a lousy husband psychiatric jewel thievery crooked private eye wife-murder film noir crime drama directed by Lewis R. Foster and starring Dorothy Lamour, Sterling Hayden and Dan Duryea. It is based on the 1945 novel The Man Who Stole a Dream by L. S. Goldsmith.

Dan Duryea plays a crooked private eye, which is the first twist in this serpentine and sinuous noir drama, which is a lot of fun as any classy high period film noir should be. The convoluted plot is at the best of times a feature of film noir, and not to be sneered at in such a circuitous story as Manhandled tells.

The Killing (1956)

The Killing (1956) by Stanley Kubrick is like a graduation class for many of the best stars and tropes of the classic film noir style.

As well as a cast including many of the styles favourites, from Sterling Hayden and Elisha Cook Jnr, through Marie Windsor and Jay C. Flippen, to Ted de Corsia and Joe Sawyer, The Killing is a kind of celebration of the style like no other.

It was in fact possible by 1956 to make almost consciously film noir pictures. The themes of robbery, lust and anti-social activity are there, and like some truly epic expressions of the style, there are no good people to talk of in here.

In fact possibly the only good character is the wife of one of the villains, portrayed as unwell and blind, and the reason for this man's turning to crime.

Crime Wave (1954)

Crime Wave (1954) is a punchy procedural film noir with classic Los Angeles location photography, and Sterling Hayden creating the tooth-pick trope.

Further, the tooth-pick may have been a stylised way of suggesting a drug habit, although Sterling Hayden's Detective Lieutenant Sims is an early and incongruous promoter of quitting smoking for one's health.

As well as crime on the streets, there is a crime in the home theme as Crime Wave hits the home invasion theme hard, too. Home invasion in film noir signals in its stylised way the demolition of the full-on dream of Americana, that so infected the States in the 1950s.

Johnny Guitar (1954)

Johnny Guitar (1954) is a bluff and luridly coloured fantasy Western, that has found its way on to the film noir style sheet by dint of its role reversin' fun, and its hard hitting characters. 

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.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) is a cool, classy, rough and stylish classic film noir hit from John Huston starring Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, John McIntire and Marilyn Monroe.

This heist film noir classic has grungy backstreet scenery and is populated by dishonourable thieves and has a twisted backstabber feel about it, with everyone backstabbing left, right and centre, save for the two central crooks that we root for, Dix and Doc.

Both Dix and Doc have virtue, with Dix played by Sterling Hayden seeming to be the moral helm of the film. It is Dix's fantasy that gives The Asphalt Jungle the most angelic and super-normal film noir conclusion as this moral thief and thug almost ascends in a moment of equine and pastoral magic.

The Asphalt Jungle was based on the novel of the same name by W. R. Burnett. It was the first major example of the heist crime caper trope, while also being a deconstruction of it. It's  a classic of the Film Noir style with a large film noir ensemble cast including Jean Hagen, Sam Jaffe, James Whitmore, Barry Kelley, Anthony Caruso, Marc Lawrence and Brad Dexter; as well as Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, John McIntire and Marilyn Monroe.