Bullets or Ballots (1936)

Bullets or Ballots (1935) is a Warner Bros. corporate crime police detective gang infiltration classic from the pre-film noir years.

Starring the star of the show Edward G. Robinson, star of many Warner Bros. and other gangster films over three decades, perfectly paired with Humphrey Bogart, very much the rising star, in the first of five films the pair made together over the next twelve years.

That film noir charts multiple social, criminal, political, psychological trends in American society is one of its fascinations and why we're here.

The Street With No Name (1948)

The Street With No Name (1948) is a gangster gang-busting cop-on-the-inside undercover documentary style FBI procedural crime wave film noir from William Keighley, starring Mark Stevens and Richard Widmark as uneasy cat and mouse opponents in the burgeoning game of federal crime detection.

As the 1950s approached classic film noir began to make an uneasy turn towards portraying, usually via the medium of the earnest authoritarian male voiceover, the technological and forensic crime detection methods.

Never much required in earlier film noir, the voiceover becomes an unnoticed interruption in the crime drama, and forms one aspect of the documentary style noir storytelling, and aspect somewhat determined to lecture and inform, as well as providing the useful service of telling the audience what is happening on screen.

G Men (1935)

G Men (1935) is a Proto-Noir Post-Code Warner Bros. crime and police procedural action film starring James Cagney, Ann Dvorak, Margaret Lindsay and Lloyd Nolan in his film debut. 

G Men, one of the top-grossing films of 1935 was a shot at portraying crime successfully within the confines of the newly enforced Hayes Code, by creatively casting crime favourite James Cagney in a non-criminal role -- in this case supporting the law and maintaining the action by becoming a federal agent.

The supporting cast features Robert Armstrong and Barton MacLane and the surrounding tension arises from the fact that Cagney's character, Brick Davis changes sides and bides farewell to the mob boss who financed his education as a lawyer, to become a full on nark, a fed or what passed for it in the long-past and unarmed days of 1935.