Film Noir

Phantom Lady (1944)

Phantom Lady (1944) is a classic wrongfully accused lousy husband fantasy murder mystery film noir, a luckless, dark and erotic tale of crime, generally in what is known as society’s underbelly.

In Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmark, 1944, starring Franchot Tone, Ella Raines, Alan Curtis, Elisha Cook, Jr, Thomas Gomez and Regis Toomey) we have all of that on show, and more

It’s one of the most purely enjoyable film noirs out there — unpretentious, fast and pleasing to watch.

It has a frantic ‘rape by jazz’ drum scene that is famed through all cinema, and is a high point of the sub-style which we may carelessly call The Female Seeker Hero noir.

Although High Sierra (1941) is likely perceived by the public as a ‘Humphrey Bogart’ picture, it is not entirely fair to see it that way.

Indeed, High Sierra is notable in many ways for how Ida Lupino’s character develops, and how she is portrayed.

Viewers will also note that Ida has top billing too, before Bogart, and that is worth something!

Critically, Ida Lupino plays a fairly ‘straight’ role here, and hers is not a character the readily fits into the various tropes and stereotypes which it is often said, dominate the female portrayals in the style.

By ‘straight role’ we can confidently say the following of Ida Lupino in High Sierra ― her character is consistent and develops across the course of the action.

While not cast as a femme fatale, or domestic simp of some sort, Ida's character, Marie, falls in love with Humphrey Bogart’s character, Roy, and remains true to the end. The entire episode is presented as her story, and her journey, with the viewer experience being hers.

Conversely, Bogart’s character is typical of a certain type of male from this era of film noir ― he may try to be doing good, but fate and his lower nature are in fact in control.

This means Roy Earle (Bogart) regularly makes wrong decisions, and not just when he is railroaded into them.

One of the lesser known wonders of the film noir style is the paranoid woman movie.

Classics of the genre are well-known ― Rebecca ― and probably the cream of the complete crop ― The Secret Beyond the Door (1947).

Dark Waters (1944) is another downbeat and typically melodramatic example, while others like The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) offer less routine scenarios, and more complex outcomes.

And speaking of outcomes, and before we proceed, here is the habitual Film Noir Spoiler Alert.

There will be spoilers in this article, as if you didn't see any of this coming! Find the full Official Spoiler Alert here.

The setting for a typical paranoid woman film is always either a house, or a marriage, or preferably both. The two are hard to separate in the noir canon, and are usually haunted not by the dead, but by the weirdness or wickedness of the living.

Psychologically, these paranoid woman movies question marriage, and perform on a woman’s fears on entering into marriage. The idea is that in acting out these spooky and unknown scenarios offers a psychological satisfaction ― the opposite of a ‘triggering’ effect.

To ensure that nobody is triggered, indeed, and to make sure that the paranoid woman films perform as desired, their action is consistent and always to be expected. Usually the only surprise is the reveal.

On the Brooklyn shore, there’s a mess of fog, and in that fog is a deep-seated and sordid corruption, seeping into the failing hearts of the innocent.

Down in this gutter, we find the broke, a bunch of hard working guys that are just trying to scrape together enough bits to secure their next fishing trip to the bay.

Out of The Fog (1941), starring Ida Lupino, is a moody yarn about a racketeer and his gormless marks, which features abundant fog and plenty of dark and moody water lapping sound effects.

Within and around this wafts John Garfield, who steps in an tries his hand at Bogart — or is it Cagney?

Hard to say.

Of course Bogart does Bogart best, and the same is to be said of James Cagney, but there’s a ton of film-flam holding John Garfield back in Out of the Fog, and try as he may, he just can’t see his way out of it.

David, Brandon and Philip are meeting for cocktails in a fancy Manhattan apartment.

But Brandon and Philip strangle David and heave his body into a sturdy wooden chest.

This is the commencement of one of the most unusual of Alfred Hitchcock’s works, Rope (1948).

It was the first Hitchcock movie to feature James Stewart and is certainly the most underrated of the four movies they made together.

It might not be classed as film noir by everybody ― Hitchcock’s films are sometimes seen as existing as semi-isolated in their own genre.

And it’s also in colour ― unusual for a film noir.

But even if you argue that this is not film noir and that it never will be, discussions are never that exclusive, and Rope still shines bright light on many of the interesting movie-based fixations of the late 1940s.

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (director Jacques Becker, 1954) is a consumate French classic.

If you’re looking for something different, a new angle on the gangster genre, then you are implored to check it out.

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi ("Don't Touch The Loot") has a great story, superior performances, largely from Jean Gabin, but most essentially it plays against a great backdrop of thugs, prostitutes and other underworld characters — here shot in many genuinely seedy settings in and around Montmartre.

A good gangster film always demands this kind of background colour, and Grisbi has it all. Merd Alors, it’s 60 years old but it is as burning hot as any turd Tarantino might turn out!

I promise you'll love it.

Humphrey Bogart played Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon in 1941 — then played Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep in 1946.

But in between these two, we find Dick Powell playing Marlowe in Murder My Sweet (1944, director Edward Dmytryk) — an adaptation of Farewell My Lovely.

History has been kinder to Humphrey Bogart than it has to Dick Powell.

So while most would argue that Bogart may have been a definitive Sam Spade, Dick Powell does well to capture the charm and cynicism of Marlowe.

In fact, he’s probably proved better at it than anybody else.

Force of Evil (1948)

Force of Evil (1948) is a classic New York numbers racket conflicted brothers pre-HUAC and voiced-over film noir with many biblical allusions (Cain and Abel, Judas's betrayal, stigmata) which pits a rising Wall Street lawyer against the modernising principles of post-war capitalism and the fascinating blue-collar practise of playing the numbers game.

Film noir is darkness, film noir is crime and film noir is human folly . . . writ large and personal, as a force of evil. Film noir renders a cinema of weakness, deceit, lust-inspired crime, greed and mid-century urban survival.

In the film noir city disasters are acted out in bars, cars and street corners, or in cheerless apartments, suggestive of a kind of homelessness.

If Fatal Attraction represents the male pitfall-movie of the 1980s, with Glenn Close presumably playing a role akin to the AIDS virus, then Pitfall (1948 André de Toth) is the 1940s equivalent, with Dick Powell sliding into the equally heinous sin of finding life too boring.

This is exactly the opening scenario of The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, and as in The Woman in the Window, the point is laboured in Pitfall.

With the war done and dusted, in fact, it seemed like a whole bunch of the film noir guys wanted a bit more action.

And there were a bevy of the deadliest women in the world on hand to supply it, steeped in the forbidden social excess and treachery that can only lead to trouble — and of course death.

The Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947, with Joan Bennett and Richard Redgrave) was released at the height of the brief boom in what is styled by this website at least, as the ‘paranoid woman film.’

In these momentarily fashionable movies, female sobs glance from wall to wall, doors loom large, keys symbolise everything, and worst of all — your husband wants to KILL YOU.

The psychology is always cod, but to make it even fishier, a psychoanalyst character is usually thrown in.

In The Secret Beyond the Door, one of the lead’s friends pipes up at the half way point and announces: “Paging Dr. Freud!”

Excitement, mystery and nerves on edge — is this what every woman longs for?

In the wake of the televised Kefauver hearings of 1950 (Kefauver Hearings at Mob Museum) which revealed the extent of organised crime in the US to a fascinated public, Broderick Crawford stepped up to camera to play a leading member of a syndicate, in its Manhattan headquarters.

Part documentary, part gangster thriller, New York Confidential (1955) (director Russell Rouse, and staring Richard Conte, Ann Bancroft and Broderick Crawford) is played to perfection and has a strong cast.

New York Confidential almost stands alone.

We're much more used to seeing the corporate gangster these days, but in the mid 1950s, at the tail end of film noir, it was a far harder pitch.

Where the sidewalk ends, morality falls away, darkness prevails and in the black folds of the night, nobody can see who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy.

Where the sidewalk ends, you’re on your own, making your own moral choices, with no guidance other than your past, and your own spur of the moment errors — your own dry, cold and helpless anger, your vendettas.

In this devilish and dangerous land, film noir lives and breathes — and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) is an epic film noir, one of the greats. It's a film that drives the cynicism home, before kicking it to death in the garage.

Directed by Otto Preminger and starring Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney and Gary Merrill.

Black Angel (1946)

Black Angel (1946) is a mystery female seeker hero lousy husband alcoholic amnesia film noir from the heart of the classic noir period.

Jean-Luc Godard said that all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl — and bien sur, Monsieur Godard knew his noir.

Certainly, Black Angel (1946) satisfies Godard’s wisdom within one minute.

There’s a lot of noir in that first minute of Black Angel.

Darkness, shadows, the down-at-heel, a glamorous girl with a gun, and piece of music that is going to haunt everyone right to their graves.

Black Angel is a classic noir and as a signpost into the magic of the media in question, consider it as fantastical elements. This part of the story and the weirdness of ambience, focused in dreamlike and ridiculous assertions, that are more nightmare like in fact, this is a hallmark more than any other to show how 40s noir was the very crucible of mystery and crime cinemas many subsequent genres.

If you’re Gun Crazy, you’re going to shoot your pistols.

And if you shoot your pistols, then somebody is going to get hurt.

Quasi-sociological accounts of how kids turn to crime can be deep down dirty good fun, even if they explain nothing.

Gun Crazy (1950) an outlaw-couple thriller and film noir, has titillation and education in the right balance.

Tearaway good-kid-at-heart Bart Tare is played by John Dall but it’s Peggy Cummins as Annie Laurie Starr who calls the shots.

The message is that it’s the broads, not the rods that are the fatal force.

La Grande Illusion (1937) is a film about class issues, that doesn't take sides.

It's an intreresting take, and pretty unusual when you think about it. But La Grande Illusion doesn't present nor admit to a bias and sees everybody as sympathetic, including the tragic aristocrats at the heart of the problems.

La Grande Illusion does at the same pretend to a strange vision of trench warfare. In the first scene Jean Gabin is in his shoddily built mess, which has a well-stocked bar and waiter.

The very next scene shows the actor Eric Von Stroheim and the Germans in their own similarly shack-like officers' mess, with an even better bar, again with its own proud barkeep.

Maybe that was what it was like. I don't know, but the German bar certainly seems to have a hell of a lot of liquor as well as a cocktail shaker.

Many of the elements most common to film noir are absent from The Reckless Moment and so much so that one must squint hard into the screen in order to find any film noir aspects at all.

What we primarily find in The Reckless Moment is a variation on the so-called woman's picture of the day, in which a mother in a suburban setting finds the respectability and polite autonomy of her family threatened — you'll think immediately of Mildred Pierce.

But there are plenty of films in which women are forcibly ejected from their marital, suburban comforts, and obliged to hit the streets in serach of dangerous truths.

Max Ophüls (here billed as Max Opuls) was known for making films which take a female point of view, or films that had a female protagonist.

The Reckless Moment is certainly one of these, and it looks at the idea of resepctability head-on, basically stating in Joan Bennet's character that the way to be respectable is not to associate with people of a lower class, who are unrespectable.

Joan Bennet's own reckless moment comes when she disposes of the body of her daughter's lover, when he is accidentally killed. This is a desperate attempt to avoid scandal, and it is the point at which the paranoia begins to ramp up, the moment when the tension pumps, and when shame blooms into criminality.

As we can see in Pitfall, and other examples as simple as Phantom Lady, the paranoid woman in the bud of suburbia is a common film noir subject ...

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!"

The opening shot of The Chase (1946) is straight out of a mad god's dictionary of crazy Americana — a burger being flipped, watched by a hungry ex-military man.

This is Chuck Scott, hapless heel about town and nervous pill-popper, a guy scarred into insecurity and down on his luck as a result of World War II.

And The Chase is not quite what you suspect. It's firmly film noir because of the psychology and the dream like quality of much of the story.

Watch out for spoilers from this point on, because the dreamlike results of PTSD, which is what is being suggested in this film, make for a mad and paranoid set of circumstances.

Detour (1945) is high noir, low budget and endlessly fascinating.

Like many of Edgar G. Ulmer’s films it was shot in 6 days.

"Just visualise it," said Ulmer, "eighty set-ups a day." It’s hard to visualise, but it sure is heroic.

Normally, this approach would produce a clunky and directionless mess, but occasionally as here, it can still produce a gem.

It's what they used to call a 'poverty row quicky', for the high-speed and low-expense of its production ... and there is something about this format that really lets the subversive implications of film noir rise to the surface.

Marnie (1964)

Marnie (1964) is the classic late period seriously is it the last meaningful Alfred Hitchcock film or at least the last he fully cared about? psychological late late period classic analytic thriller cineamternity Freudian love melodrama suspenseful sex mystery paranoid woman lousy husband drunken sailor classic neo-film noir, with all the big tricks of the Hitchcock trade, and Tippi Hedren facing Sean Connery, who plays a publisher called Rutland.

Classic film noir — deceitful people at work — a private dick with a dicky past — a murderous art dealer with an obsession about a woman in a painting — sluggings in the dark — frame ups — a cheating wife — crosses — double crosses.

The Dark Corner (1946), directed by Henry Hathaway, presents full-on film noir in the shape of an ex-con detective willing to bend the rules at every point, with the most wholesome role going to an angelic Lucille Ball — though even dear sweet Lucille is up to her elbows in it.

Up to her neck in fact, in blood, lying, is conspiracy to conceal evidence, washing murder weapons and immediately opting to cover up a crime rather than report it . . .

Welcome to the Dark Corner of Film Noir!

The walls and floors are streaked in shadows and there's a noisy boxing match roaring in the city.

Behind the scenes, a girl is pursued down darkly expressionist corridors, with only the self-gratified roar of the crowd as backdrop.

As The Big Combo starts we’re right in there at the heart of the caper, although the real story of The Big Combo is that of Cornel Wilde’s cop, and his obsession with catching the cooly menacing crime lord, Mr Brown, played brilliantly by Richard Conte.

To fulfil its film noir promise, The Big Combo is also hot with slick dialogue, the sort they just don't write no more:

Joe McClure: I guess I'm getting too old to handle a gun.

Mr. Brown: Yeah, maybe you're just getting too old, Joe.

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.

Although the propaganda is blunt, it’s easy to overlook how enormously popular I Was a Communist for the FBI was in its day.

That day was 1951 and I Was a Communist for the FBI spoon fed the anti-Communist prejudice of its era so hard and fast that you'd be forgiven now for thinking that it was a parody — but it’s not.

The slimy backstabbing Communists in Gordon Douglas’ film may not be real, but the fear of them was real.

As was the hero — Matt Cvetic — although this isn’t a true portrayal of him.

Cvetic wasn’t of the greates use to the real Feds, but wholly came into his own as a media personality, and one who could be relied upon to play it nice for the crowds. What a heel.

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

The Lady from Shanghai is a 1947 classic drifter murder mystery adventure frame-up film noir directed by, written by, and starring Orson Welles and co-starring Welles's then-wife, Rita Hayworth.

It is based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King.

A classic film noir for certain, and a legendary production, the sensibility of Orson Welles tipping again towards the joy of genius in the later 1940s.

As a film noir The Lady From Shanghai (1947) is a self-conscious exemplar of the style, throwing in further hints of Joseph Conrad, amid darkness and deceit, and the weary anti-hero — a romantic Irish drifter-writer figure created by Welles, a man who moves on a whim, cynical and attractive, individualist artistic type.

Plenty camera love is devoted to photographing Rita Hayworth and it may be among the most erotic photography of the decade. Combined with heat, deceit and rancour it makes for an exciting look, fore fronting sexual desire.

This time yesterday, Jean Dexter was just another pretty girl. But now she’s the marmalade on 10,000 pieces of toast.

In this fashion — by being murdered — this young model becomes one of the stories of The Naked City (1948) which was not just a seminal film noir, but a new departure in many different screen-crafts.

If you were looking for brave film making in 1948, this was it — cutting edge — innovative and yet sticking to some familiar aspects and techniques, as seen its police procedural and final chase and shoot out.

It was all the inspiration of Mark Hellinger, who was one of the most ground-breaking producers of the time. And directed by Jules Dassin, whose film noirs always appear in critic's top tens.

A Bout de Souffle (1960)

A Bout de Souffle (1960) (Breathless) is a classic of something, but not everybody can agree what exactly it is a classic example of.

It is New Wave for sure, and although is too postmodern by far to be a genuine film noir, the French (and in this case Jean-Luc Godard, a Suisse) appropriated film noir for their own, and made a virtue of its every trope.

And film noir's every trope is stated in A Bout de Souffle. Trouble is that to appreciate Breathless, and see what is going on, a viewer has to see the picture from a historical context, which requires studying the French New Wave, film theory as a whole, and the lives and attitudes of its contemporaries.

For devilish double-crossing and deceit, Destination Murder makes a decent stab.

The central wise-ass is a total scuzzball, a murderer and two-timer who takes up blackmail and loves to think he’s in charge.

His boss is Armitage, an evil nightclub owner, who has a player piano which plays the Moonlight Sonata every time he throttles someone to death.

Weirdly, when he kills his fiancée in the apartment of his right-hand man, the player piano is present, begging the question — did Armitage actually bring the piano with him to the murder scene?

This and many other stupid questions trip quickly offa da brain while watching this low grade film noir, which both perlexes and pleases in equivalent degrees.

Angels Over Broadway (1940) is a pretty little film noir B-picture, with elements of comedy and farce tagged on to some more usual elements, which include a suicidal male lead and some hoods playing a crooked game of poker.

The 'angels' of the title ultimately gather around an insecure and insignificant little man who is about to kill himself, due to mis-appropriated $3,000.

These three unlikely characters are grifter and street-dwelling shark-about town Douglas Fairbanks Jnr; confident and innocent girl-on-the-up Rita Hayworth, and playwright and bombastic drunk, Thomas Mitchell.

What starts as a scam against the suicidal man is transformed by this unusual crew into more of a long con, when the four conspire to cheat some very bad gang-members out of money in a seedy high stakes game.

The mark, in effect turns the tables and becomes the conman, although this high risk strategy of course doesn't play out as expected.

Eddie Robson, who is one of the world’s most thorough-going experts on film noir, is determined that Stranger on the Third Floor is the world’s first film noir.

Not that one should spend a lot of time on this debate, but still it’s discussed. And he might even be right!

Despite being heavy on the expressionist shadows and the hapless hero, Stranger on the Third Floor lacks a few key noir elements, notably the femme fatale or bad girl — of which there is none.

But Stranger more than makes up for that in shadows and the psychological blurring of dream and reality.

Who is The Enforcer?

Is it Humphrey Bogart who plays District Attorney Martin Ferguson, the guy who enforces the law, slapping hoods where necessary, an enforcer of morals in a sick crime game?

Is The Enforcer Everett Sloane as Moriarty-like mastermind Albert Mendoza, a man so feared in the city that even the mention of his name enforces a certain silence, an absolute fear, the inevitability of a violent death?

Or is The Enforcer tough guy turned snivelling snitch, Rico, played by Ted De Corsia, whose king-pin status keeps the whole racket going; Rico who enforces the deadly conviction of the mysterious boss man, until his own nasty death?

It is not possible to keep track of the flashback-cum-story within a story structure of The Enforcer. The first ten minutes take place near the end of the story, and from thence the editor dives to the start, periodically dipping further into the past as hood and victims tell their stories, generally to Ferguson, the character played by Bogart.

Kansas City Confidential (1952)

Kansas City Confidential (1952) is a classic no-honour-among-thieves heist patsy on the case film noir, starring John Payne as a determined innocent man, trailing the gangster crew who set him up for a heist he had nothing to do with.

This all time classic slice of Columbia noir has plenty of malice crammed into the close ups of its prolific baddies’ sweaty, greedy faces.

Director Phil Karlson made some pretty smart crime flicks in his time, such as 99 River Street and Scandal Sheet, and while it has cheap moments, Kansas City Confidential may be the sweatiest of all film noirs, with several gallons of perspiration being shown on the flow in each act.

Sheer noir entertainment awaits in the evil forms of some great noir character actors — Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand are an excellent trio of baddies, each with their own fatal foible.

Kiss Me Deadly is also known for its weird credits
which back up the screen instead of descend

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is a typically depraved hardboiled film noir story, with an uncaring and sleazy anti-hero.

There are complex plot threads that form an overall labyrinth that has to be ignored if you are to enjoy the story, and Cold War and nuclear paranoia grow like rampant weeds through this, eventually and dramatically engulfing everything.

Kiss Me Deadly has many of the elements of film noir — a stark opening sequence, several destructive femme fatales, a clutch of low-life gangsters, and many expressionistic lit night-time scenes.

There is also within this mess of noir, a vengeful quest, and a constant dark mood of hopelessness, which shows that the patterns of film noir had by this late stage in the canon been refined into a high art in themselves.

It is also the closing point of the canon, the last ever film noir — so everything after May 18, 1955 — the day that Kiss Me Deadly was released — can officially be known as ‘neo-noir’.

That's what they say, anyhow.

In a Lonely Place (1950) by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, always turns up pretty high in those lists of classic film noirs.

This probably has more to do with its adoption by the French New Wave than it does with true noir credentials, and the fact that it is one of Hollywood’s periodic flashes of its own underbelly.

But Bogart is slick, wise-ass and selfish and so is the movie, which doesn't offer up a hero but instead presents a bitter and depressed cynic anti-hero incapable of heroism.

It's a comment on the 1950s, when screenwriters were accused of communism and their friends often turned against them, and Humphrey Bogart plays it dark, often amoral, insisting that a girl find her own cab, refusing to show empathy for a murdered woman, remorseless when shown photos of a crime scene and sexually aroused when given the chance to re-enact a violent murder.

The greatest tale of moral degradation in film noir is Quicksand (1950) — with Mickey Rooney, Jeanne Cagney and Peter Lorre.

It’s standard issue for a film noir to ship with a weak male lead, but often these guys have issues to begin with — their moral compasses have been spun to point to Palookaville — sometimes by war, by crime, suburbia or a dilemma that’s placed in their path. It ain’t so with Mickey Rooney as Dan Brady.

Dan Brady in Quicksand isn’t crooked — not like his boss — and he ain’t a heel. He’s a happy-go-lucky hard blue collar worker who winds up on a an epic moral descent, which begins after he successfully chats up femme fatale Jeanne Cagney but then needs twenty dollars to take her on a date.

Ministry of Fear (1944)

Ministry of Fear (1944) is an espionage dream Nazi spy thriller starring Ray Milland, presenting an almost surreal succession of events and clues as one man is sucked further into a murderous Nazi spy plot as he inadvertently receives something the enemy agents are after — in a cake which he wins at a bizarre midnight village fete.

The Nazis in Fritz Lang's film noir mid-war favourite Ministry of Fear aren't presented in the typical style of the day.

The Nazis in this film noir classic don't wear swastika armbands and nor do they make fascist speeches about the benefits of the Reich's new order, a sight common enough from other mid-War propaganda.

There were many films made about WWII, during WWII. The movie Nazis that made the most impact at the time were in the style of the pompous evil-doers of films like Sherlock Holmes And The Voice Of Terror (1942); or Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943).

To avoid making audiences read subtitles in-a-da movies, foreign-speaking characters are generally played by actors speaking Amerenglish with a variety of accents.

We are used to this, and don’t mind a bit of it — the English is useful because we can understand what’s being said, and the accent is handy because then we know what type of person they are, and follow the assumptions thereafter.

Marlon Brando — a self-confessed MASTER of accents — muddled his entire way through The Young Lions pretending to be German (pronounce this ‘Chairman’) with lines like "Ve vill sturm the Ardennes and crush dee Amerikanz" — and although he didn’t say that, at least there were plenty real American accents in the film to provide contrast.

In So Dark the Night (1946) by Joseph H. Lewis, these issues are exacerbated as the entire film is set in France — making it the most unwatchable film-noir of them all.

Out Of The Past (1947) is a classic fate-filled doomed-romance revenge mystery film noir, directed by Jacques Tourneur, and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas.

From the shadows of the past stumble the memories of your misdeeds. They lug themselves towards you in heavy coats and hats — packing heat and chewing on cocktail sticks.

Whatever you do, wherever you go, fate can catch you — fate WILL catch you.

And that’s the message of Out of the Past (1947)

Out of the Past is one of the most heavy duty, hard-wearing, cigarette-smoking film noirs in the whole damn canon — hoods, hats, hold ups and past actions dredging up the most awful barrelfuls of darkness.

Depending on your point of view, Orson Welles is either peripheral to, or central to film noir; peripheral in that he didn’t make many films that are considered to be noir; central because of the influence of Citizen Kane, made when he was only 25 years old.

While not a film noir, the chiaroscuro lighting of Citizen Kane, the low-angle photography and nonlinear structure had a great influence on film noir as it developed in the 1940s and 1950s.

Welles is considered to have made three ventures into noir territory with Lady From Shanghai, Touch of Evil and this overlooked gem — The Stranger — which remains his first, and maybe his only commercial success.

The Stranger, starring Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young and Welles himself, has an excitement largely generated by Welles’ own performance, which is intense — to say the least. It’s a sweet addition to the noir barrel, with a great opening and an unbearably fine performance from Orson Welles.

Despite spectacle, stories and such technical attributes as lighting and special effects, it’s a comfort that the biggest pull in cinema is that vague quantity known as ‘star quality’.

It’s star quality that makes a film noir classic like The Maltese Falcon watchable, even when the plot is failing. There’s a section about 40 – 50 minutes into The Maltese Falcon in which the story widens out — suddenly there are more adventurers revealed, and a whole lot more in terms of characters and detail — and for those not used to the vagaries of the medium , this is the moment many switch off.

If it weren’t for Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, and the vile duplicity portrayed by Mary Astor, they may even not switch back on again.

Nicholas Ray a made at least half a dozen films held in high esteem within the noir canon.

And he also provided us with Rebel Without A Cause in 1955.

Films like In A Lonely Place (1950) stand alone as examples of psychological doubt run wild.

On Dangerous Ground (1952) and They Live By Night (1949) are both rural noirs, and special for numerous reasons, the least of which are driving intensity of their stories and characters.

Born To Be Bad (1950) is also special. It isn't an A-grade example of film noir; there is no murder, and no murky shadows in which lurk criminal gangs, weakened males and femme fatales wreathed in cigarette smoke. There are no thugs, sluggings and it's also not that full of dark secrets, merely propping itself on the one, which the audience are soon aware of.

Yet Born To Be Bad carries a different sort of weight and to understand it, one must consider the so-called 'women's pictures' of the day.

Unlike more male-centered films which are often filmed outdoors, woman's films are set in the domestic sphere, which of course defines the lives and roles of the female of the era. The events in woman's films, such as weddings, proms, births, are socially defined and the action in male films, such as pursuit and fighting, tend to be story-driven.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) is a cool, classy, rough and stylish classic film noir hit from John Huston starring Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, John McIntire and Marilyn Monroe.

This heist film noir classic has grungy backstreet scenery and is populated by dishonourable thieves and has a twisted backstabber feel about it, with everyone backstabbing left, right and centre, save for the two central crooks that we root for, Dix and Doc.

Both Dix and Doc have virtue, with Dix played by Sterling Hayden seeming to be the moral helm of the film. It is Dix's fantasy that gives The Asphalt Jungle the most angelic and super-normal film noir conclusion as this moral thief and thug almost ascends in a moment of equine and pastoral magic.

The Asphalt Jungle was based on the novel of the same name by W. R. Burnett. It was the first major example of the heist crime caper trope, while also being a deconstruction of it. It's a classic of the Film Noir style with a large film noir ensemble cast including Jean Hagen, Sam Jaffe, James Whitmore, Barry Kelley, Anthony Caruso, Marc Lawrence and Brad Dexter; as well as Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, John McIntire and Marilyn Monroe.

Film noir may be associated with Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s but it didn't start there. It came from Europe, and if you need evidence of this then look no further than Le Quai des Brumes, directed by Marcel Carné and released in 1938.

In terms of European influence on film noir, we often hear about the German expressionist style which took off in the 1920s, but also of note is a school of film-making which is exemplified in Le Quai des Brumes, that of Poetic Realism.

What that means is that the crummy back-alley feel of film noir, and the often impoverished urban settings and doomed romances of film noir, evolved in part from films like Le Quai des Brumes.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

San Francisco is something of an idée fixe in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941).

In fact the first words on the screen when the film begins are the words SAN FRANCISCO which precede the film's action.

It goes a bit deeper than that though!

Just as in the novel by Dashiel Hammet, The Maltese Falcon charts Sam Spade's disjointed and incoherent chase around the city in great detail, and with a weird accuracy that simply must be trying to make a point.

Bob le flambeur (1956)

For the lover of film noir, and the French dedicatee of American cinema, there is Jean-Pierre Melville's 1956 movie Bob le flambeur.

Mai oui, Bob le flambeur is a French film, but in many ways it could barely be more American.

It was made by director Jean-Pierre Melville who was obsesed with all things American, and who loved the gangster films of the 1930s, 40s and 50s so much, that he made many of his own.

In Bob Le Flambeur, we find is the first great hommage to noir, for Bob Le Flambeur is an outsider's view of American cinema, an attempt to make an American style film on foreign soil.

The story features many film noir elements — it is set in the criminal underworld of a big city, and features a loner who at various times works on both sides of the law, even though he is essentially a crook. The urban settings and the odd camera angles will also be familiar to viewers of classic film noir, as will be one of the main themes — a man undone because of a woman.

Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950) is a cinematic excoriation, a nocturnal fugue of failed aspiration, doomed enterprise, and lurid spectacle. This British-American hybrid noir, directed by an expatriated American director fleeing the sordid tribunal of the House Un-American Activities Committee, coalesces around the jittery figure of Harry Fabian—a human perversion of motion itself. Played with convulsive energy by Richard Widmark, Fabian is a miscreant whose ambition corrodes every surface it touches. In his breathless pursuit of legitimacy through London’s professional wrestling underworld, he performs a danse macabre before the abyss.

... who is she going to be today?

Sylvia Harvey in the book Woman's Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir, in an essay titled Women in Film Noir, states that women in noir tend to conform to two types: 'the exciting childless whores, or the potentially childbearing sweethearts.'

Today I'd like to offer two more types of women who appear throughout the cycle of film noir in the 1940s and 1950s. These will be the Female Seeker Hero and the Paranoid Woman.

There is a long established tendency not just in film but in all art to define women in relation to men. We all know about the film noir femme fatale but other female types are less discussed, so here is a quick look at them.

Jane Wyatt and Lee J. Cobb

The Man Who Cheated Himself, 1950 film noir and available free from archive.org - directed by Felix E. Feist and starring Lee. J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt and John Dall.

For anyone who isn't only enjoying the film noir feel of skid row, but is actually living on skid row and can't afford to rent any movies, free film noir is an invaluable source of entertainment.

Free in this instance just means free of copyright, but of course this generally means you can watch a bunch of these films on archive.org or on public uploads made to YouTube.

Directors beware. Failure to renew copyright can default your masterpiece to the List of Films in the Public Domain in the USA.

New York Confidential (1955)

New York Confidential (1955) is a Manhattan hitman action and romancing 'Confidential' series New York on-the-ground corporate crime country club hypocrite political scheming, punch-up shoot-out and dragnet multi-male Kefauver-inspired crime syndicate insider circle of self destruction organized crime politically and judicial bribery criminal cartel classic film noir mobster melodrama by Russell Rouse and starring Broderick Crawford, Anne Bancroft, Marilyn Maxwell, Richard Conte, Mike Mazurki,

New York Confidential (1955) has qualities so numerous with fights and shootings an elevator scene a parking garage scene Broderick Crawford with set dressed sky-scarpers in the background scenes which give the film a lot of confidence, pushy lushes, lushes galore with the lushing of Marilyn Maxwell fairly amongst the greats of the noir lady of sadness and sleaze, the gangster's wife, when the gangster is a skyscraper dwelling man of bullets, matched by the young lushing of Ann Banncroft, incredible exactly like a young Ghislaine Maxwell, suicidal and unable to cope with life as her gangster father's daughter.