Black Widow (1954)

Black Widow (1954) is a colour DeLuxe mystery Broadway cocktail suicide murder CinemaScope motion picture with film noir leanings. 

Attention spans alerted everyone this slider of a slow noir is another object lesson in the class of colon noirs which feel their way in a cinematic dark so much of the time and are managerially staid with a tragic inability to fill the vacant screen space created by colour-vision and wide screen tech. A double whammy of screen emptiness.

Come diving headlong into the murky waters of a slow burn noir flick that's as sluggish as a slug on a warm sidewalk. This one's a textbook case of those colour noirs that stumble in the shadows, groping blindly through the cinematic darkness, like a gumshoe with one too many shots of rum, yum. Yeah, it's got all the fancy-pants tech — living colour, widescreen — but it's like watching paint dry in a rainstorm. A double-barreled blast of cinematic emptiness that hits you square between the eyes.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is a high period film noir telling a complex tale of love, weakness, criminality and fateful meetings. 

As in the mode of any high grade film noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) speaks of the past and its characters' inability to escape it. 

In fact the characters in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) seems to exist around one moment in the past, a fateful once when Martha Ivers committed a murder as young girl.

Everything else in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is about what this murder brings about, creating a drama of many parts, fixedly rooted in one fateful and distant moment.

Moreover, it's a complex film — not a classic love triangle story, but something more akin to a love parallelogram.

Possessed (1947)

Possessed (1947) is high period paranoid woman family mystery amnesiac film noir with complexities galore, and starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin and Raymond Massey.

Working wonders with the flashback structure, Possessed starts in dramatic style with a woman on the wander through some vacant city streets, murmuring only the name 'David' to herself.

The opening, which punches hard upon the perennial themes of urban isolation and amnesiac or damaged individuals lost within these concreted jungle confines, opens the door to frame an entirely flashback-told story of a woman called Louise Howell, played by Joan Crawford, who is presumably the possessed character of the title.

East Side, West Side (1949)

East Side, West Side (1949) is melodrama crime film with noir overtones, starring Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Van Heflin, and Ava Gardner. 

It's a film of socialites and infidelity, one of these glimpse-into-the-lives of the rich and popular, and a look at their habits, drinks, dresses, affairs, apartments, moeurs and murders.

In this world it's always a beautiful morning, and the jewels and the dresses sparkle, and platonic relationships spring up, as does the rekindling of old flames. There is a club where they hang out, and a friendly barman called Bill — and it's always time for a straight Scotch.

The Prowler (1951)

The Prowler (1951) is a modest and excitingly unpredictable doomed-love-affair obsessional-voyeur and adulterer crooked-cop film noir starring Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes as two lovers who find themselves in an evil mess of murderous ill happenings after starting an affair that is set from the off to go badly wrong, premised as it is on prowling, envy, lust and a crooked copper's cravings.

Although The Prowler promises voyeurism and terror, it is not exactly this type of film, and spends its time following cop Van Heflin as he pushes his way into this victim's life.

Van Heflin is excellent at this character, Webb Garwood, who is unhappy in his job and just simply can't get why some people have got rich houses and classy women, when all he has is his crummy boarding house room and for company, his sharp shooting targets.

Johnny Eager (1941)

Johnny Eager (1941) is a delightful and fast-moving early period classic film noir, starring Robert Taylor and Lana Turner as two compromised and heartless individuals working against their better natures as they slide fatefully into separate dooms.

Directed by Mervin LeRoy and also starring Van Heflin and Paul Stewart, Johnny Eager is a cynical entertainment showing criminal hubris as only the gangster films of the era can.

Lana Turner plays her role almost without anyone appreciating her full star power, and she is certainly no femme fatale, but rather a femme who is fated, almost lost between two worlds, represented by the gangster she falls in with in the form of Johnny Eager —  and her stepfather, who is the District Attorney who imprisoned him.

Act of Violence (1949)

A former prisoner of war, Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is hailed as a hero in his California town.

However, Frank actually aided his Nazi captors, and he closely guards this secret!

Frank's shameful past comes back to visit him when fellow survivor Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan) emerges, intent on making the turncoat pay for his betrayal. 

As Joe closes in on Frank, the traitor goes into hiding, abandoning his wife, Edith (Janet Leigh), who has no clue about her husband's wartime transgressions. When Frank begins to truly fear his nemesis, played by the relentlessly limping Robert Ryan, he begins to speak of him as if he were speaking of the stalking figure of death itself. 

And his paranoia is total:

"You don't know what made him the way he is - I do!"