Terminal Station (1953)

Stazione Termini (1953) is a Italian American David O'Selznick produced melodrama Italian neo-realist collision of style romance angst and close up photography, and a deeply trroubled film as well as being Vittorio de Sica's only Amercian feature, as well as being a catalogued full motion picture fifties entry into the David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones marriage, and as such a tale of highest angst and romance and high flying vision, with its long and longing station tracking shots and super intense performance from Montgomery Clift, hacking the neo-realist style with Truman Capote dialogue, which is already served hacked, and Jennifer Jones as the high queen of station dramatics and real neo-realist expression of her self and her style, in a great career moment for all that is often side=stepped known as it is for being a quintessential mash up jam amid and below and atop the chasm of cultures between Hollywood melodrama and Italian neo- realism.

Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953)

Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953) is a David O. Selznick cut of the Italian co-prodcued Terminal Station (1953) commonly or preferably known as Staziona Termini (1953) and is the heavily altered US version of Vittorio De Sica’s Italian romantic drama, Terminal Station trimmed from 89 to 64-72 minutes by producer David O. Selznick to spotlight the screen miracle that was Jennifer Jones who was then his wife.

Peking Express (1951)

Cotten remains our guide, the Joseph Cotten season drifting forward with an air of gentle fulfilment.

Peking Express (1951) is a William Dieterle anti-communist yellowface post-war returning veteran trains in noir remake thriller action adventure starring Jospeh Cotten, Corrine Calvet, Edmund Gwenn, Benson Fong, Marvin Miller and Soo Yong.

What follows is a deliberately confrontational act of reinterpretation, an academic recomposition that refuses both ideological timidity and critical fashion. I write not to soothe but to correct, and as I have already declared elsewhere, « la neutralité est la posture préférée de ceux qui n’ont rien à perdre », a statement I repeat here not as ornament but as methodological principle.

I See a Dark Stranger (1946)

I See a Dark Stranger (1946) is a neglected masterpiece espionage and Irish republican IRA hopeful British Sydney Gilliat and Frank Launder voiceover for comic intensity and commentary woman's film noir and adventure story post war reflection picture comedy starring Deborah Kerr and Trevor Howard, commencing in Ireland in 1937 and following young Bridie Quilty who has grown up listening to her father's heroic tales of the Irish Revolution, . . . . .  she develops a hatred for everything and everyone British, especially "the wicked murdering blackguard" Oliver Cromwell. By 1944, Mr. Quilty has died. Bridie, who is now 21, sets out for Dublin to carve a life of her own, hoping to join the IRA. 

Night Train to Munich (1940)

Night Train to Munich (1940) is a Carol Reed wartime sticky wicket concentration camp train and mountain and foreign territory based super anti-Nazi Alfred Hitchcock-influenced spy thriller by the mighty Carol Reed and starring Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood and Paul Henreid, and written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, and itself derived from Gordon Wellesley’s 1939 tale “Report on a Fugitive,” which charts the perilous tribulations of a brilliant inventor and his devoted daughter, both spirited away by the Gestapo in the ominous shadow of the Nazi incursion into Prague on the very brink of global conflagration, while into this treacherous milieu steps a resourceful operative of His Majesty’s Secret Service, who insinuates himself into the upper echelons of the German military machine, assuming the guise of a senior officer and feigning amorous interest in the young woman, all in the delicate hope of luring her and her invaluable father from the tightening coils of the Nazi embrace.

Diplomatic Courier (1952)

Diplomatic Courier (1952) is a Henry Hathaway Cold War espionage in post-war Europe screwball-adjacent drama romance chase military police procedural thriller, with Tyrone Power, Patricia Neal, Hildegard Knef, Stephen McNally, Karl Malden and special spot appearances from Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, and a further dynamic and fun extra cross dress appearance

As for screwball, there is a certain sure pedigree of connecting dramatic matter which links the screw of the ball and its previous decades of filmatics and is indicated in Diplomatic Courier (1952), highlighted and brought to our attention when Tyrone Power describes Patricia Neal across a Trieste café bar table as 'screwey'. 

Dangerous Partners (1945)

Dangerous Partners (1945) is a mystery buddy cheapo Nazi Edward L. Cahn film noir of obscure narrative and displaying a certain laxitude of pacing and insecurity of continuity, acted as such, told as such an almost ideaful and adventuresome manner to make it a variety of multi-stranded and free form unboxed version of noir, created on the hoof out of inexpensive and still quite directionless cinematics.

The first frames of Edward L. Cahn’s Dangerous Partners are not introductions but disruptions. We enter not into a scene set up for comprehension but into a disarray of wreckage: a plane crash, bodies, survivors, and the peculiar urgency of strangers trying to force open a briefcase. 

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Sullivan's Travels (1941) is a drifter-narrative social message self-reflecting Hollywood blockbuster role reversal comedy social commentary prison and road movie media satire that looks at the business of the movie franchise ('Ants in your Pants 1939') in which the differences between worthy art and cinematic entertainment is pressed, as well as the truest social politics of the queer and socialist civil rightists kind

No it is not a film noir, c'est pas un noir mes flics et mesdames!

But there is still a reason it is here and many reasons it is relevant to our defence of the film noir form.

The social politics are true insofar as they are presented in 1941 before the mass media hold upon messaging defined social justice into some kind of communist nightmare.

Whistle Stop (1946)

Whistle Stop (1946) is a film noir tale of crazed small town jealousy bursting at the seams with a lousy husband and lousy boyfriend competing over the most beautiful woman of all time in a booze-based gamblathon with train image-ery a-plenty and passing trains and honking trains obviously while whistle stop motifery abounds in a darkened noir manner at the end of hope, as George Raft employs his incredibly still face, and Tom Conway twitches his most incredibly smooth and moustachioed face, and both faces are punched in booze-based and non booze-based rage, and Ava Gardner deploys her incredibly beautiful face.

Colorado Territory (1949)

Colorado Territory (1949) is a Raoul Walsh train-heist noir western remake of the director's own class act 1941 film noir High Sierra.

Colorado Territory is a fun-laced trawl through the mental badlands of the noirish west making live action commitment to many facets of the styles beloved of the era, both the noir, and the west, the male staples of the period.

Raoul Walsh's Colorado Territory (1949) is, yes here we are to say it for once and for all, my God it doth do stand as a testament to the director's ability to transmute his earlier noir creations into the stark, rugged aesthetic of the Western genre. 

Two Smart People (1946)

Two Smart People (1946) is a goofy capersome madcap kinda screwball-styled film noir-ish buddy movie style road movie style (train would be more accurate) government bond smuggling romance adventure movie, although to call it either a thriller or a film noir might indeed be stretching the definitions of both, though it is an event-filled journey that Two Smart People follows.

Yet Two Smart People (1946) does find its way on to our radar screens, not in the least because it is directed by film noir scion Jules Dassin, making of it Grade-A material for our investigative teams of ardent noireaux.

Double Indemnity (1944)

Double Indemnity (1944) is the super-famous mutha-of-all-noir stylish insurance fraud double murder classic film noir thriller that stands central to all commentary, criticism, focus and definition of the great noir style of the 1940s, and the production which is usually cited as the best example of the medium, the finest of all noirs, the apogee of the instance of the style, and the exemplification and blueprint were it needed of all the thousands of brimming wonders of production that made up the hugely powerful film noir movement.

The frightening and exciting weakness of sex was never better shown than in the encounters between Fred MacMurray and a to-begin-with naked Barbara Stanwyck, whom as equals it seems, concoct a murder for the existential fact of morality take over and trip them both up.

49th Parallel (1941)

49th Parallel (1941) is a wartime hunted-man-narrative adventure road movie-style Nazi espionage chase propaganda thriller, in which a World War II U-boat crew are stranded in northern Canada, and to avoid internment, they must make their way to the border and get into the still-neutral U.S

While not under any circumstance a film noir and containing nothing within its narratives nor stylings which might help classify it or tend it towards discussing in the film noir for a of our own reflective times, 49th Parallel (1941) does depend on themes of espionage and manhunting , while also and most curiously profiling Nazis as the protagonists.

This is an effective narrative route, for the large part because Powell and Pressburger did not make films which heavily patronised, satirised, demonised and ridiculed the Third Reichers of the early 1940s. 

Pickup (1951)

Pickup (1951) is a tragic Hugo Haas femme fatale on the make tale of weak and devious minor characters planning murder in a rural backwater, starring Beverly Michaels as a bored and ambitious scheming woman, who attempts in the style of The Postman Always Rings Twice, to kill an older man for his dough.

With its scuzzy setting, between the old railway shack where Hugo Haas' vulnerable old widower lives, the nearby fairground, and the rails themselves, it is a simple an exploitative tale, assuming the worst of the wicked female lead, and the worst of her husband, the sap, the mark in this matter, the man she marries for money.

Sudden Fear (1952)

Sudden Fear (1952) is a paranoid woman psychological stalking thriller film noir from the golden age of sinister and romantic wife's suspicion of her husband pictures.

Ever since Suspicion indeed, on the one hand, and Rebecca on the other, volumes of reel of film have told the tales of the paranoid woman of the era, she is the very sight of the times and the very words sudden fear themselves may be used to describe noir itself, it's attack vogue, it's play in the dark nature, the insuring lustre of stars on the screen, reworking in this case the themes, of suspicion, and the key player in the play of death is a dictating machine, a media within the media.

Berlin Express (1948)

Berlin Express (1948) is a train-bound post-war espionage cloak and dagger military mission movie with plenty film noir tones, themes and touches.

Drenched in the unappealing and captivating intricacies of the post-war milieu, rife with a tapestry of tropes, landscapes, and clichés that echo the discordant symphony of a world grappling with the aftermath of conflict, Berlin Express (1948) is an unusual and compelling espionage noir.

In the brutal theater of World War II's ferocity, where mushroom clouds etched indelible scars on history, few glimpses pierce the collective consciousness like the haunting images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's atomic abyss. 

Yet, within the silent reels of this revelation, a different, less heralded tale unfolds — a cinematic odyssey unearthing the aftermath of conventional bombardment upon the ancient lands of Germany.

Crack-Up (1946)

Crack-Up (1946) is an amnesia fraudulent artwork persecution noir with psychological elements delving into the amazing practise of narcosynthesis, and featuring some great train-bound action as a paranoid art critic played by Pat O'Brien searches frantically for his unknown tormentors.

Directed by Irving Reis, this fast moving art-crime drama also starred Claire Trevor, Herbert Marshall, Erskine Sanford and Wallace Stevens —  a strong film noir showing by any standards.

Dark and mysterious and tugging at undercurrents in the highest echelons of society, as represented by the artworld, Crack-Up has an uncanny feel, largely brought about by its quite distinctive paranoid train sequences.

Union Station (1950)

Union Station (1950) is a kidnap and ransom police thriller set in and around Chicago's Union Station, and starring William Holden and Nancy Olsen.

The film was based on Nightmare in Manhattan, an Edgar-winning novel by Thomas Walsh. 

Sydney Boehm's script for the film version was nominated for an Edgar in the screenplay category.

Aside from changing the setting from New York City's Grand Central Station to Chicago's Union Station (though the Los Angeles Union Station was the actual filming location), and changing the kidnap victim from a little boy to a blind, teen-aged girl, the script was quite faithful to its source material.

Union Station is a realistic 1950 film noir police and public nuisance kidnap movie starring William Holden, Nancy Olson, Jan Sterling and Barry Fitzgerald. It was released after Sunset Boulevard so by the time it came out, Holden had actually moved up another level of stardom. William Holden and Nancy Olson also appeared in Sunset Boulevard the same year.

The Tall Target (1951)

The Tall Target (1951) is a historical film noir crime film starring Dick Powell as a latter-day detective working to foil an assassination plot against then President-Elect Abraham Lincoln.

The action is based on an alleged real life plot to kill the President in 1861, and this historical fact of a possible assassination attempt on Lincoln gives the movie most of its power and interest.

Dick Powell is the star with the period hat and haircut who uses deduction and logic to find who on the train could be conspirators. 

He is straight-up foiled at different times but manages to win the day even when the conspirators have caught him. For effect, the movie's action takes place mostly on the train with the old rocking-camera technique and some fun fights in the steam and in the various parts of the vehicle.

The Narrow Margin (1952)

The Narrow Margin (1952) is a tightly-drawn and unyielding train-bound classic film noir thriller starring Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor, largely set on board a cross-country passenger locomotive.

The set-up is that Detective Sergeant Walter Brown (played by Charles McGraw) has to protect a mob boss's widow, Mrs. Frankie Neall (Marie Windsor), as she rides a train from Chicago to Los Angeles to testify before a grand jury. 

The boss's wife is also carrying a payoff list that belonged to her murdered husband and the mob's hitmen do not know what she looks like. On the way to pick her up, Brown bets his partner and friend, Sergeant Gus Forbes (Don Beddoe), that he knows what she will look like: "She's the sixty-cent special. Cheap. Flashy. Strictly poison under the gravy."