The Furies (1950)

The Furies (1950) is a dark and simmering Freudian subtext-laden family plot tycoon and succession drama noir western.

Anthony Mann’s The Furies (1950) occupies a unique place in the Western genre, transcending traditional conventions to deliver a dark, psychological drama that explores themes of power, family, and vengeance. As a director, Mann had a reputation for transforming the Western from a genre defined by its action-oriented plots into a medium for complex emotional and psychological narratives. 

Rear Window (1954)

Rear Window (1954) is a classic Alfred Hitchcock suspense and murder mystery voyeur noir film cineaste's dream romantic drama about marriage, and one man's ability to face the prospect, while weirding a large camera at a window, from which he sees people, and yet no person appears to see him.

The dream of murder commences as James Stewart's character photographer Jeff appears to piece together something far too gruesome to be shown on screen, including the hack sawing of a woman's body.

The Killer Is Loose (1956)

The Killer Is Loose (1956) is a cat and mouse revenge killer on the run suburban family man cop film noir from the cul de sac end of the great mid century American noir cycle.

The Killer Is Loose (1956) is a film noir thriller with modern echoes, although the 1950s had already seen the death of modernism. We may well come back to that.

Yet the cinema has to be the ultimate of all modern artforms. The modern period, insofar as it relates to art, literature and most importantly of all, politics, can really be said to take place between 1880 and 1950.

It is curiously enough during this period also that cinema rises, develops, achieves its potential, and then enters the same decline as all else in post modern period.

Harriet Craig (1950)

Harriet Craig (1950) is a neurotic woman lady noir with high drama, rudeness and female perfectionism ramped to its psychological worst.

The story stars Joan Crawford and Wendell Corey and it is impossible to look away from either. 

Joan Crawford plays Harriet who is the suggestive opposite of the lousy husband, her husband is pretty nice, while she however is destructively controlling about everything, and in the manner of the human comedy, she explores the fringes of madness in the bourgeois dream, and is representative of a kind of stylistic madness.

Harriet Craig was directed by Vincent Sherman, produced by William Dozier, and distributed by Columbia Pictures. Harriet Craig is the second of three cinematic collaborations between Sherman and Crawford, the others being The Damned Don't Cry (1950) and Goodbye, My Fancy (1951).

Hell's Half Acre (1954)

Hell's Half Acre (1954) is a female seeker film noir about a woman who travels to Hawaii to investigate her missing or dead racketeer husband.

As a rather unique slice of Hawaii noir, Hell's Half Acre stars Evelyn Keyes as the seeker hero on the trail and Wendell Corey as the lousy husband, who is actually still alive but changed his identity due to his own criminal activities. 

Hell's Half Acre was written screen by Steve Fisher, who also wrote I Wake Up Screaming which is a sure-fire classic film noir 

It's set in a rundown section of Honolulu, incredibly well photographed it has to be said, and down there on Honolulu's skid row there are all kinds.

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

Good times with the paranoia on full-beam. That's film noir and this is Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), one of the most eminently exemplary portrayals of the 1940s housewife.

The film noir style presented this to perfection and in its highest form in the 1940s.

Paranoia is central to the film noir style. The urban jungle is fraught with dangers, and some are human, and some are technological. 

Some are criminal and others are political, and any old way you look at it, when you're in film noir, you're in the land of doubt, deceit and usually murder to boot.

There'd be no film noir without paranoia, and one of the stand-out examples of this is the 1948 film noir Sorry, Wrong Number, with Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster ... and tucked away there, along with Ed Begley, is Wendell Corey.

Of all the significant innovations the film noir style introduced to the popular imagination, paranoia may be among the best. First there’s the political paranoia, whether it is down to Nazis or Communists, or later in the cycle, your own government.

I Walk Alone (1947)

I Walk Alone (1949) is a bold, fun and fast-moving flick with a truly film noir title.

It's a strong exemplar of the film noir style, even if it isn't held up as the one of the greats.

Frankie gets out of prison and after being triggered by the sight if some shadows at the station which remind him of prison bars, he heads down to Broadway ― it looks the same he says. 

But his pal isn’t so sure. The first early signs of the fast-bending steel of the film noir male, here beautifully and memorably played by Burt Lancaster, is one minute in, when he says angrily, and almost to himself  . . . that it better be the same.

It is not of course, the same. The war, and prison, similarly dealt with and both brutal and emotional in their transformative violence . . . these have changed everything. 

The war and prison have more in common that Burt Lancaster's sympathetic and tragic expression. And if one can be in one for the purposes of entertainment, one can certainly be in the other.

Desert Fury (1947)

Racy, gaudy and melodramatic, Desert Fury (1947) commences as a somewhat typical if confused film noir.

In full and blazing colour, ripping back and fore across the wilds of the fictional Chuckawalla, and ultimately settles on the fraught mother and daughter relationship between two Golden Age favourites ― Lizbeth Scott and Mary Astor.

The cast is strong ― John Hodiak and Wendell Corey play two barely sublimated homosexual gangsters, while Burt Lancaster has little to do as the local police deputy. 

The crux of the capering belongs to the aforementioned Lizbeth Scott and Mary Astor, two women in search of more than just each others' love.

The File on Thelma Jordon (1950)

A woman’s place in film noir is evilly clear — she’s the seductress who tempts the man into his own destruction — although often she plays a stronger role as the heroine, the seeker hero of her own, solving a crime on behalf of an imprisoned or incapacitated male.

Even if they are irresistibly destructive, the women of noir are never static symbols of male repression — they’re intelligent, powerful, and overly-sexual.

The File on Thelma Jordon is Double Indemnity meets Pitfall — disguised as a well-presented story of marital infidelity. 

And it has Barbara Stanwyck in the lead, bidding for film noir immortality.