Vicki (1953)

Vicki (1953) is a modelling-business murder mystery flashback violent cop remake of the earlier classic film noir I Wake Up Screaming (1941).

Richard Boone is terrific as the violent cop with a terrific hunch, found peeping, creeping, never sleeping, punching and shouting and best of all, and in the most aggravating urban New York big city cop style of noir, just deciding that a person is guilty - in this case merely from a photograph - and then simply beating them and shouting at them and others too if that's what ti takes, beating and shouting repeatedly until the case is closed.

Vicki is the ambitious young model making her way, and somehow not forgiven for her pushiness and willingness to mould the truth to her amorality, from time to time. She pays for this upfront, and is murdered, a murdered glamour girl in an uncaring city. 

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.