The Fountainhead (1949)

The Fountainhead (1949) is an Ayn Rand adaptation and scripted hyper-melodramatic didactic economics and social science charged pre-post modern pre-relativist objetivist and more than just a little film noir tinged melodrama of rags to riches UnAmercian Dream-style semi-speculative cross class dedication to art and architectural and individualistic vision unromantic romance set-up with its no promises and no obligations ultar-objectivist marriages alternate reality white suprematic media manipulation and propagandist anarcho-capitalist post-communist anti-communist media demagogue public opinion forming artisitic vindication of terrorism in the name of individualism impotent platonic-erotic love triangle drama directed by King Vidor and starring Patricia Neal, Gary Cooper, Raymond Massey, Kent Smith, Henry Hull, Moroni Olsen und Ray Collins, yah, Ray Collins is in this film produced by Henry Blanke.

The Red House (1947)

The Red House (1947) is a Delmer Daves genre-defying rural horror mystery film noir dark secret in the woods and dark secret in the past suspense thriller young love southern gothic and western guilt ridden disabled farmer rudimentary domestic adventure chiller suspenser with Edward G. Robinson, Lon McCallister, Judith Anderson, Rory Calhoun, Allene Roberts, Julie London, Ona Munson and Harry Shannon. 

The Upturned Glass (1947)

The Upturned Glass (1947) is a British flashback and voiceover brain surgeon and love affair murder madness and suicide sanity-searching wicked lady and high quality limey 1940s criminologist revenge introspective and calculated insanity intriguer with star of the show James Mason, and Rosamund John, Pamela Kellino and Ann Stephens.

A Star is Born (1954)

A Star is Born (1954) is a Judy Garland comeback star vehicle musical scratch the surface portrayal of Hollywood stardom and its machinery love story and doomed romance tale of alcohol, fame, and every day studio and star system misogyny, big production piece musical action and suicide and love and success and failure and the scheming folly of the industry that produced it, and while not only not a film noir but emphatically not a noir nor noir film, is still in its narrative and meta-narrative and reflective qualities, one of the darker musicals one might see, in its reflections made upon the place and time of Hollywood at the end of the golden era of the silver screen.

Victim (1961)

Der extreme Höhepunkt des absoluten Kinos in Bezug auf die Basil-Dearden-Filmsaison.

Victim (1961) is a classic British later late period film noir blackmail and homosexuality socio public crime and mystery social issue internalised homophobia Basil Dearden lousy husband thriller noir which as well as being the the first British film to explicitly name homosexuality and deal with it sympathetically, is a sneak look into the male queer London underground as it affected lives high and low, pub going and inner court, bookshop and barber shop, and starring Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Syms, Dennis Price, Anthony Nicholls, Peter Copley, Norman Bird and Peter McEnery as Jack "Boy" Barrett.

Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945)

Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945) is a British historical poisoning and lousy alcoholic husband murdering Victorian age pharmacist daft dreaming son and local intrigue and femme fatale drama with Googie Withers, Mervyn Johns and Gordon Jackson, in a pent up family story of murder, reserve, calculation and feral femme folie in a beautifully set studio recreation of an 1880s Brighton agay with m class tension, social climbing and gossip.

Conspirator (1949)

Conspirator (1949) is a double agent British espionage and early Cold War Soviet versus England romance and intrigue anti-USSR propaganda spy thriller starring Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Taylor, Honor Blackman and Robert Flemyng, in a Victor Saville directed tale of female belittlement and abuse in the honourable name of spying for the Soviets, while protecting the integrity of the Brits.

Round it thusly spins, not so fast, but with a fairly interesting admixture of fog and domesticity, with some cold and lonely English wetland landscapes to break up the misery.

Blonde Ice (1948)

Blonde Ice (1948) is a femme fatale cheapie wicked woman newlywed criminal psychology top society columnist aspiring politician and ruthless ice maiden obscure film noir revolving around a femme fatale low-budget crime drama for the interesting Film Classics company directed by Jack Bernhard,  and starring Robert Paige as Les Burns, Leslie Brooks as Claire Cummings Hanneman, Russ Vincent as Blackie Talon, Michael Whalen as Stanley Mason, James Griffith as Al Herrick and of course, Emory Parnell as Police Capt. Bill Murdock.

Murder! (1930)

The nascent works of Alfred Hitchcock, those formative exercises in suspense and moral ambiguity produced in the liminal years between silent expressionism and the codified sound era, persist as spectral presences within the embryonic landscape of what would later crystallize as film noir.

Murder! (1930) is an Alfred Hitchcock death row amnesia proto film noir poetic realist murder melodrama locked room  mystery sleuthing and amateur detection story of touring theatre blackmail and early twentieth century racism and transvestite trapeze performance.

The Spider Woman (1943)

The Spider Woman (1943) is a Roy William Neill Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce 1940s era mid-war Sherlock Holmes serial movie series entry horror (?) film production and extremely rough adaptation serial killer and sleuthing light entertainment crime and detection film with various noirish aspects, and also starring as it does Gale Sondergaard and Dennis Hoey, may be one of the better items on the Holmes 1940s registry.

The Spider Woman (1943) occupies a curiously authoritative position within the Universal Studios Sherlock Holmes cycle, a position it did not reluctantly inherit but rather seized with a vigour that demands attention. So Holmes, so far. Curios and authoritative, we are fans and though this not be noir, it is still noir informed and noir informing, so give it credence.

Hôtel du Nord (1938)

Hôtel du Nord (1938)  is a French classic classic French proto film noir doomed pimp and darkly comic bickering dialogued suicide and true romance couple almost on the run prostitute prison and imprisonment ensemble cast melodrama of working class Parisien life from Marcel Carné and starring Arletty and Louise Jouvet.

Marcel Carné's Hôtel du Nord (1938) emerges from the late interwar period in France, perched delicately on the brink of catastrophe. Its mood of dreamy disillusionment and marginal existence is a quiet whisper of the cultural malaise circulating through a Europe growing weary of its own shadows. 

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is a classic Universal Monsters monster classic James Whale camp horror mad scientist angry torch-wielding mob driven queer coded Breen-positive historic recreational fantasy monster horror feature film sequel from the earliest most nascent era of screen creations both bestial in demeanour and possessed of a quasi-mythic savagery, marked by both vaudeville and a brutal, subhuman force, a movie which like its creatures, groans under the weight of its own deformity and beauty, respectively, with pile-driving feminist angst clashing misogynist tropery galore. 

Cosh Boy (1953)

Cosh Boy (1953) is a exciting but also earnestly vile teen exploitation juvenile threat ditto post war youth trouble boom psychopatriarch urban noir also known as The Slasher (1953) movie which studies juvenile delinquency and the spectre of moral collapse in Post-War Britain using the crime thriller format and which charts the birth of cruelty as a form of social and parental guidance for the worrying young persons' culture which the cinema and its co-habiting rock n roll and jazz exponents were cashing in upon, coshing in you might say — — and be warned — — Cosh Boy (1953) has the most vile and violently cruel conclusion in all of Limey post war silver screen flickery. The most violent ending of any film of the decade — reckons .

A Life of Her Own (1950)

The Ray Milland season does not advance so much as unfold — temporally, tentatively, beautifully. Its path is all digression and delay, yet within that slow meander there trembles a strange coherence, the whisper of a destination it cannot name.

A Life of Her Own (1950) is a George Cukor woman's picture young model from Kansas trying to make it big in New York, doomed romance and suicide driven depression discussing psychological critique lousy husband melodrama starring Lana Turner and Ray Milland, Louis Calhern and Ann Dvorak, Jean Hagen and Phyllis Kirk.

Pépé le Moko (1937)

Pépé le Moko (1937) is a mouche-noir French proto film noir Casbah-bound crime glamour seduction violence and poetic realist romance and intrigue police procedural classic of crime cinema and of French cinema, starring Jean Gabin and directed by Julien Duvivier.

As for films that stand the test of time and remain classics of cinema, and also classics of film noir, enough in fact to be here heralded and touted as an example of nothing less than classic film noir, then one must watch them to make the mind up, and not take any old soul's advice on that.

Watching Pépé le Moko (1937) is no duty however and will be a true pleasure, for the acting and the intrigue, for the framing and the fun, for the well constructed mis en scene and the en scene itself, of the many corridored confusions of The Casbah are the perfect and perfectly realised backdrop of this movie wonder. 

In the context of this, Julien Duvivier’s 1937 film Pépé le Moko, “le Moko” is not a surname but a nickname. It derives from the French slang term moko, which was used to describe people from the region around Toulon and Marseille in southern France, particularly dockworkers and sailors. 

Leave Her To Heaven (1945)

Leave Her To Heaven (1945) is a psychological thriller toxic love and 1940s psychopath-styled state-hopping powerful female lead with undiagnosed ADHD Technicolor sophisticates in frocks writer hero high-grossing classic film noir melodrama, with Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Craine and Vincent Price.

One of the most intriguing questions regarding Leave Her To Heaven (1945) is why it was Twentieth Century Fox's highest grossing film of the decade. 

The Sea Wolf (1941)

The Sea Wolf (1941) is a nautical noir ghost ship of shame and cruelty dramatic abduction and high seas wrecking crew medical and maritime madness Jack London adapted tale of intersecting American narratives combining the frontier of the sea with the oldest narrative tropes known to the continent, including the olden mania of the rogue seamaster and the anti-Nietzschean struggle for the victory of normalcy over ubermenshcary.

Michael Curtiz's 1941 adaptation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf occupies a peculiar intersection of seafaring adventure, psychological realism, and the film noir sensibility emerging in Hollywood during the wartime period. 

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) is a psychological vigilante and posse film noir western starring Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, Mary Beth Hughes, Dana Andrews, Harry Morgan and Marc Lawrence.

If film noir is about anything it's got to be moral failings and immoral decisions, and if the western genre is about anything it is about the rough construction of United States by means of law and order.

Many of the film noir westerns we watch deal with the construction of a legal process and the layering of the base myths of Americana, and it was fitting therefore to see this quite par hazard in its ideal double billing with My Darling Clementine (1946).

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) is a film noir for certain, largely because of the murderous mob and their moral dilemma, after we have witnessed the moral and murderous decision making of a new American community, an area of land and an area of being in which law and order are not as codified as they could be. 

Black Hand (1950)

Black Hand (1950) is a violent Italian-American historical mobster and protection racket revenge social issue thriller film noir, packed with cliché and atmosphere, and which partakes of the Italian American immigrant experience, with no-holds-barred villainous violence and later nineteenth century criminal moeurs.

Starring Gene Kelly as a hero for the good of the new country, and an immigrant who much in the style of the later Michael Corleone, vows a vengeance on the Black Hand gang that killed his father.

The historical aspect is accurate as it goes, and most notably there are scenes of pubic speaking during which the existence of the Black Hand is denied completely, something that was common to the phenomenon.

Mirage (1965)

Mirage (1965) is an amnesia corporate crime nuclear threat hunted man paranoia thriller film noir, usually called a neo noir by the time we have come to examine the 1960s and its use of the style.

Yes, even though Mirage (1965) was made by Edward Dmytryk in the 1960s it rolls with the full flavour of all iconic and classic film noir, from the paranoiac lost in the city, to the hats and hoods of a mysterious underworld. Great motor cars and docu-noir style street action, a dream-like quality, and mystery intimate quick flashback visions as Gregory Peck pieces the cliches together, with the unique addition of Walther Matthau.