Man Bait (1952)

Man Bait (1952) is an exceptionally literal title for a film that appeared with several different titles ― none of which were any cop in the film noir title stakes. 

With every passing year, as film grew in popularity as a method of impregnating global minds with ideas of sexuality, more morality for girls was forged on the screen.

Sexuality was in the air, and film noir tells of its dangers, the dangers of crime and crime's links to sexuality; it tells of of sexuality and sexuality's links to crime; noir tells of sexuality's exposure of male morals to catastrophically attractive female beauty, and everybody's inability to cope with the results.

This is in fact what film noir does best; it destroys the surface currents which pull us a long, dragging hapless males and sexualised females to the bottom of a vortex from where no one will emerge happily married.

Stolen Face (1952)

Stolen Face is a slightly wacky, strange fantasy fable 1952 British film noir directed by Terence Fisher and starring Paul Henreid, Lizabeth Scott and André Morell.

Lizabeth Scott and Paul Henreid star in this British oddity, in which a plastic surgeon rashly attempts to both satisfy his love life and solve female criminality ― by means of his skilled rhinoplastic practises.

The resulting fantasy, Stolen Face (1952) is more in line with the fantastic and horrific than it is with the criminal, and its film noir fibre lies only in its paranoid view of male sexuality, and crime.

To get this out of the way before anything else, the oddity in question concerns the notion that the heroical plastic surgeon played by Paul Henreid has concerning beauty, femininity and crime. 

His is an odd thesis: that if only a woman were beautiful, she would not become involved in crime.

Hence this fantasy fable is part mad-scientist story, which verges on horror and suspense, has a stab at being a love story, and is all-in on the misogyny required to tell a story which is all about the moral importance of female beauty.