Film Noir

Terror Street (1953)

Terror Street (1953) is not the tale of terror its title may promise. But it stars Dan Duryea, and is a classic slice of limey noir.

It's crummy, and it's wooden, and it moves the pace of a cement snail at times. Terror Street also falls into the film noir 'Lousy Husband' sub-genre.

Men fail as much as they succeed in film noir, and if you are a lousy husband, you'd better be prepared for the bizarre consequences.

And don't be looking for much terror, film noir fans, as you venture down terror street. That would asking a lot.

There may yet be terror lurking there, but Terror Street is going to make you wait.

Instead, over the first nearly twenty minutes of Terror Street, you will find what seem like hours of solid wood largely coming from Dan Duryea, although this is barely his fault. It is as if Duryea has been asked to perform as solidly woodenly as he can by the directors of the piece; as if there is nothing else for him to do.

So Dan steps up with solid wood for the fans.

And the mis en scene, the action, the script and the psychic landscape of terror street, provides if truth be told, all the terror of a plate of cold Limey porridge.

So what is the point of Terror Street (1953)? How could this slice of Brit noir have come to have been made, and had the manufacturers of this misnamed flick understood anything of the dark noir rumblings which had been piling their way across the Atlantic for nearly fifteen years?

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.

One of the best times you can have if you crave a sixty-five minute paranoid woman film noir, is My Name Is Julia Ross (1945), starring Nina Foch.

Should there be madness in your script and the stretching of credibility, and should your script also be offering some subtle social comment, then there will be film noir.

The theme of there being a woman-in-danger ― or as the producers might prefer it ― to call it exactly what it is in their minds ― the paranoid woman ― is a firm film noir fave.

Nina Foch is one of many who had a bash at this ― note: you can tell she is a paranoid woman, because she is shot in bed. The paranoid woman is always filmed in bed, often clutching the covers. It's one of the more obvious signs of the trope. Bed is where these paranoid women often are!

Nina Foch however keeps the suspense on high throughout. The script never strays from her dilemma, which is just as well, because as with other films in this style, once examined, the set-up will be revealed as preposterous. It's one of the other better genre tropes and why it makes this psychological mayhem the fun time it is.

This is all happening in your marriage!

The Raging Tide (1951) is a terrific and raging and calming and reflective and stormy crime and adventure movie, that likes to think it's a film noir, but actually spends too much time having too much wholesome fun in the traditional business of fishing to earn some fulsome bleak city noir chops.

Still there is enough here for The Raging Tide to get some slices off those chops.

Those bleak city noir chops! And it mixes them up with some salty salt-of-the-earth sea-chops.

Richard Conte and Charles Bickford do in fact get soaked by props men spraying them and tossing buckets of water at them. It is that kinda milieu.

And The Raging Tide starts with a murder, a no-nonsense affair in the dark.

Then the murderer is on the run, through that film noir city, bright lights and shadows, raging through the streets. That's perfect, and exactly what you'd want to see of Richard Conte. On the run, in the city, in the dark. C'est noir . . . even if it does end up at sea.

The Mask of Dimitrios (1945)

The Mask of Dimitrios (1945) beloved of many whom adore the adventurous and thrilling aspect of the silver screen in its lovely golden age, is part mystery, part adventure and a part film noir.

That part which remains film noir, is here within The Mask of Dimitrios, perhaps relegated to the baggage of delight and mystery which is transported within the facial and emotional aspects presented by Peter Lorre.

Lorre in The Mask of Dimitrios does not however play to any of his strengths, and plays best of all in his duet with Sidney Greenstreet. Peter Lorre is for once the good guy, the hero no less, the seeker on that often-told quest and his are the bulging eyes through which the audience approaches the mystery.

Like every good slice of film noir, The Mask of Dimitrios is told mostly in flashback. Like many other film noir favourites, the character flashing back is in fact a writer, a mystery writer in this case.

On hearing about the exploits of the international blackguard Dimitrios, Peter Lorre becomes fascinated and determines to learn as much as he can from as many sources as he can find, and crucially, every one of these sources has been left sadder and wiser after their encounter.

Jean Negulesco who later moved over to 20th Century Fox and made more lighter films than this, did manage to generate of dream of sorts here, in the form of a study in pure evil, in the form of Zachary Scott playing Dimitrios Makropoulos.

Edge of Darkness (1943) is a Nazi-heavy Norwegian war romp with more dead bodies in its opening few minutes than you could shake any number of Nazi pointing devices at, assuming your Nazi pointing devices were not too busy pointing things out on your incredibly detailed Nazi models of Norwegian villages, strategic or otherwise.

The alternative title for this amazing war effort is Norway In Revolt, which does sum things up in a manner of speaking.

And once viewers have overcome the surprise of the many piles of dead bodies, piled across other dead bodies, piled inside and outside in mounds and heaps which would seem utterly infeasible, had the bodies once supposed to have been alive, there is a fairly exciting, fairly tepid, and at times pleasantly complex film awaiting, promising not just Errol Flynn, but more critically than this, Ann Sheridan.

Yes, you can come for the piles of bodies or the Norwegian models, or the overtly evil and ridiculous Nazis, but it turns out that only Ann Sheridan is worth the wait.

The Sleeping Tiger (1954) is a Brit-teen jazz-crime tearaway movie, with stiff upper lip, hot and sexy jazz in Soho, and failed psychanalysis taking place in the midst of an even harder failing marriage.

The subject matter is the mood music of the British time; teenage criminality, the hopeless British stabbing at psychoanalysis; the tragedy of marriage and the family, and the failure of men to control the disastrous environments their misogyny created to begin with.

While Dirk Bogarde's character suffers from an inability to control his criminal teenage urges, his psychiatrist can't control his profession, and is a failure as a husband while obviously believing he is doing the right thing. When he is mansplaingly doing the wrong thing, again and again, while being the lamest husband ever.

And the teenage tearaway Dirk Bogarde is marvellous; his character longs to have actual issues but he is in fact a middle class boy, which makes his random bullying and cigarette puffing anger all the more wild; and how he has the hot-hots for his psychiatrist's moody wife!

Two years in a Nazi prison camp and Bill Saunders ― played by Burt Lancaster ― doesn’t like to be caged up one little bit.

First it drives him to drink ― anything to try and forget.

Then there's his uncontrolled violence down the pub.

Finally, a trip to the zoo, can be entirely triggering for him.

Bill Saunders should never have come to London. It's certainly not the world's film noir capital either.

But here he is with Joan Fontaine, in a fascinating, compelling, melodramatic and slightly strange concoction called Kiss the Blood off My Hands.

The story of the post-war male is a film noir staple. The rescuing female belongs to a much older tradition ― but even knowing that he’s a killer, doesn’t stop Joan Fontaine from a heart breaking attempt at rescue.

Kiss The Blood Off My Hands (1948) is one of those great film noirs in which the entirely story is told in the title. The hero is a murderer ― he has blood on his hands. The female lead is going to rescue him ― with love ― as symbolised in a kiss.

The aim thereafter is redemption. Can she wash away his sins with her love? And is World War 2 excuse enough for a man when it comes to drunken violence?

Find out the answers in Kiss The Blood Off My Hands.

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.

Adapted from the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, the 1947 film noir Lady in the Lake was an experiment and a half for star Robert Montgomery, and his directorial debut to boot.

Montgomery was keen to replicate Chandler’s first-person voice over style as he brought the iconic gumshoe, Phillip Marlow back to the screen.

Except for a few instances, Lady in the Lake is presented exclusively from Marlow’s point of view with Montgomery providing the detective’s voice.

At some points the camera is punched by some tough guy. There are some other amusing tricks, like when Marlow is on the phone, we see the mouthpiece, blurred in the lower frame; and when Marlow holds a lit cigarette, smoke drifts up from below the frame.

At one point, the hard-working femme fatale leans in for a kiss on the lens.

Film Noir is full of oddities, largely because everything was coming of age at the same time.

Cinema, culture, youth culture, psychology, post-war capitalism, men, women and children, were all breaking forth from scores of different chrysalises and all at the same time, in film noir.

In The Big Night, we watch the kid George become the man George in the most 1940s noir way imaginable ― he puts on a jacket tie, and finally ― a hat.

Hey presto ― grown up.

It’s just society’s bad luck that this young man finds a gun shortly after that. Only joking George. George immediately enters the noir city of the 1940s, complete with boppin jazz all night, drunks and of course, the character who leads who leads him astray.

It isn’t long before George is experiencing heavy confrontational scenes in toilets, bumps and bashses, and George continues on his search, never looking quite at all the man.

He's like ‘Kid Noir’ in fact.

A late film noir and criminal fable, Nightfall (1956) features Anne Bancroft, Aldo Ray, Brian Keith and is urban, violent and twisted ― while also taking a dip in the snow.

With an unravelling story that doesn’t in the end bear too much close inspection, Nightfall is a late period film noir which follows form fairly closely, with its pair of malignant hoods ― one smart (played by Brian Keith) ― and one plain dumb and brutal ― played by Rudolph Bond.

There’s a case full of money, the final word in thriller MacGuffins, and a man adrift in the urban jungle.

There are a pair of gangsters, armed and dangerous and unrelenting in their pursuit and their cruelty. There’s a model, innocently wrapped up in the fearful chase ― and to make a difference, there are snow-bound scenes aplenty, shot in the wilds of Wyoming.

You might already be forgiven for thinking that Tarantino had been here before you too, and you would be right on that count also.

There are four to five hundred stories in the film noir city ― and around two dozen of them are sure-fire, indisputable, authentic classics.

Brute Force is one of these.

Directed by Jules Dassin, it’s a story from stir ― strong men beat it out of each other as they go crazy behind prison walls. The manliness is multitudinous and the cruelty drives them to the end of their tethers.

Interests collide in a story that is both one man against the system, but also an indictment of the system itself. The cons are grim and the guard is grimmer. The result is a simmering and boiling mass of machismo, acted to within an inch of its life by a cast of glowering guys, who will do anything to survive amid the harsh conditions imposed on them.

Even outside of the canon, this is one of the greatest action, social and thrilling films of its day, with so much to commend the casual viewer, the film noir fanatic, and those generally interested in film.

The Christmas Holidays are the perfect time for film noir. Christmas stories are after all always about redemption ― while film noir deals directly with betrayal, failure, and loss.

There are a few film noirs set during the season, including Christmas Holiday, They Live By Night, and Mr. Soft Touch.

World War 2 is so important to the film noir style that emerged in that decade, because it wasn’t all about the great optimism and patriotism that applied to the drive for victory. There was of course also a dark, corrupt universe to describe, and it portrayed a cultural dark side, an underside to the image of goodness.

The whole Christmas genre in fact showed individuals who would come to value the importance of life, while film noir did the opposite. The forces of nature, whether they were attraction, compulsion or pure criminality, always exposed the underside.

Christmas Holiday (1944) has a compelling yet strange narrative structure. It is unusual in that it portrays a story told to an innocent at Christmas time. The hero of the film ― the young soldier who has just graduated from military school, is unceremoniously dumped by his sweetheart, and then by a further twist of fate finds himself stranded in New Orleans ― itself partially representative of America’s own American Nightmares.

From the moment we see John Hodiak’s bandaged faced staring at the field hospital ceiling, we know that Somewhere in the Night is going to be a tale of film noir identity.

Combined with another staple of the style ― the male, recently returned from World War Two, and lost in the city ― Somewhere in the Night (1946) offers true noir chops: the disoriented soul, lost in a city of crime, seeking identity and of course redemption in the arms of a female.

One of several high period film noirs directed by Joseph L.Mankiewicz ― see also Escape (1948) ―House of Strangers (1949) ― No Way Out (1950) and 5 Fingers (1952) ― there is something contained in this mystery that is bursting to be free, and which almost comes loose at several points.

This makes Somewhere in the Night for the most gripping. John Hodiak is the ex-soldier bereft of identity, afloat in the city, seeking himself. He is something of a pinball, bashed from clue to clue as he tries to pick up the trail left by the mysterious Larry Cravat. This is name I read appears to be spoken some 85 times in this movie!

This winds up taking him into an abstruse riddle, focused on the retrieval of some Nazi loot, and through some great locations ― there’s The Cellar nightclub ― and every film noir needs a good nightclub at its heart ― an interesting cabal of thugs who live in an amusingly dressed fortune-telling parlour ― and an insane asylum, another staple haunt of the broken and de-militarised male.

Rebecca (1940) is the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece that won Best Picture and Best Cinematography Oscars in 1940, and was nominated for seven more, and may both be and not be held by those who have a say in these matters to be a film noir.

But if Rebecca is not an example of film noir, what then is Rebecca, with its suspense, mystery, paranoia and brooding atmosphere?

Rebecca in fact while not held as being film noir, does feature many of the aspects of the genre which may be called the paranoid woman film: a young woman, captive in body and mind, lost in a spooky house masquerading as a family home; and a husband who may or may not be homicidal, possibly also even suicidal.

Thing is, in this production, the husband is captive too, which may be a more accurate psychological assessment of marriage. At the very least, Rebecca is a firm and fine example of the paranoid woman genre, and is certainly also to be considered in many aspects as - an example of film noir.

In London in 1902, An unhappily married Charles Laughton falls for a delightfully prim Ella Raines.

The result ― is MURDER.

At least that is the conclusion of the police force, in The Suspect (1944), a faintly suspect film noir in its own right, and a movie which relies heavily on the talents of the two leads, Charles Laughton and Ella Raines.

It is in fact difficult to see what might be left to enjoy, were these two high quality talents were to be removed form The Suspect, and replaced with lesser mortals.

Charles Laughton was always a star, and enlivened any production he appeared in, even if it were as pedestrian as this one. And Ella Raines has her own star quality ― not just her grace and beauty, but communicative skills which shine across the decades, giving her a uniquely compelling quality ― unique because it is not based on either sex appeal, or some lurking maternal quality.

And that is unique, and perhaps something to be celebrated.

In the difficult old tradition of American film noir directors, stars, writers and technicians fleeing the blacklists of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Joseph Losey made several decent British film noir movies, including The Intimate Stranger (1956), a mystery tale of deceit from the heart of the British film industry.

And likely when you see it, it will be called FINGER OF GUILT.

But have no fear, this was and remains the American title of this Losey lost noir, Losey who was working under the alias Alec C. Snowden, having as we have seen, fled The States in the midst of Red Terror.

Finger of Guilt or The Intimate Stranger, then, you may take your pick.

Losey was blacklisted in the United States at the time when he made this film, and with a number of other American directors and screenwriters, he had moved to Britain and began making films, disguising his real identity behind an alias. 1956 was that kind of year.

The screenplay was written by Howard Koch who had also been blacklisted, and wrote under the name Peter Howard. The film was made at Shepperton Studios, with Losey using as we have seen already, the non-noir handle and nom de guerre, Mr Incognito himself ... Alec C. Snowden.

Losey also has a small cameo part in the film, playing a film director.

Felt by some of us lovers of the cinema to be a tiny treasure of the silver screen, Jules Dassin's 1941 short feature version of The Tell-Tale Heart features a manic performance from Joseph Schildkraut as the apprentice weaver who kills his cruel master, only to be tormented by guilt, in the aural form of his master's still-beating heart.

Edgar Allan Poe didn’t always transfer successfully to screen, even when dramatised to the utmost in the hands of Roger Corman. And even in Roger Corman’s hands, plenty needed to be added ― including camp, suspense, romance and even back stories and new action.

The divide that is being bridged in the filming of Edgar Allan Poe concerns the massive popularity of Poe’s writing. Because of their short length, their memorable titles and scenes, and the fact that they largely presented a Freudian interior human world, long before there was any Freud or Freudian analysis, kept the writing of Edgar Allan Poe valid ― even unto the 1960s ― these facts alone make Poe tempting indeed for any movie producer.

But in Poe stories there is often not a lot of action, but instead, vortices of interior turmoil. There is sometimes not a lot of dialogue, but instead doubting turns and descriptions of crummy corners, hysterical emotions and vast natural, often unseen forces. There are often strong key images, that everything hinges upon ― and sometimes the stories seem to be entirely internal ― a little like this one.

There was clearly huge cinematic fun to be had with the special effect which allowed two Olivia de Havilland’s to appear side by side on the same screen.

The name of that film noir fun is The Dark Mirror ― a crazed noir fable from 1946,

Fun is correct in fact ― when the twins appear side by side for the first time, although the subject in hand is a grisly murder and an obvious deception ― both twins must know exactly which twin committed the murder ― Dimitri Tiomkin’s score turns to a light form of circus music ― and a merry pantomime plays as Thomas Mitchell scratches his head, acts befuddled and effectively says “well I never!” for a full minute.

Mitchell often did play comedy however as a character actor. In fact he was in some of the very best films of the period, including Lost Horizon (1937); Stagecoach (1939); The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); Gone with the Wind (1939); It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and High Noon (1952). He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1940 for his role as the drunken Doc Boone in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939).

With the comedy dealt with, The Dark Mirror’s next plunge is very film noir indeed ― into psychoanalysis.

Rope of Sand is an action-adventure movie with film noir elements, featuring Burt Lancaster, who certainly was one of the film-noir kings of the 1940s.

Although it sometimes appears on lists of film noir titles, Rope of Sand isn’t urban, it isn’t psychological, it doesn’t feature much of those well-known shadowy cinematic elements, and its femme fatale turns on her heels fairly quickly, changing from a manipulative and greedy cheat, into a loving and caring amour, on the basis of a coup-de-foudre attack of love.

Corinne Calvet, who plays the femme fatale turned girl-next-door, Suzanne had an interesting, but rather unsatisfactory career. She made over thirty films, but the vast majority of people will have heard of none of them.

And most actors who have worked for forty years in Hollywood will have been in at least one major production.

Corrine Calvet’s entrance in Rope of Sand is stunning, however. She vamps in and immediately attempts to abuse Claude Rains in the worst way possible ― tousling herself up after blagging her way into his hotel room, she announces that if he doesn’t give her money, she’ll say he raped her.

When this doesn’t work, she reveals her true colours as a prostitute and then actually offers herself for money.

Hitting the grounds of Bunker Hill running, Criss Cross (1949) opens with great excitement in the midst of several dramas.

There’s a fight at a night club ― or is it a fight? There’s a panicky couple of lovers ― Burt Lancaster and the incredible and much loved Yvonne De Carlo ― and there is a sizeable team of men, who have clearly come together with larceny in mind.

One long flashback and many moments of indecision from Lancaster’s character ‘Steve Thompson’ later, and the movie concludes with its high-octane combination of heist-gone-wrong meets triple-cross.

In Criss Cross, Robert Siodmak made a restless film noir, giving the story an exciting structure that raises the drama higher than it might otherwise be. The art here is in complicating something that might under other circumstances be quite straightforward.

One way this is achieved is through some regular film noir favourite tropes, moves and signals.

The first of these is the idea of returning. This isn’t just a favourite theme in film noir, and it is the start of many a good story. But film noir does use this to a great extent. Thus the flashback commences with Burt Lancaster’s character returning to Bunker Hill ― full of melancholy ― full of wisdom ― full of questions ― replete with memories ― weighed down with experience ― and looking for a lost love.

The 1944 film The Lodger, starring Merle Oberon, Laird Cregar and George Sanders, is a fine example of movie making splendour, ponderously piling suspicion upon suspicion in a brave attempt to create suspense.

The Lodger doesn't fail at all, however, and in spite of some ropey material at times, the three above mentioned leads act their socks off, and are watchable for every second of their screen time.

Less convincing are the cookie-cut Cockneys, the London bobbies in the fog and the behind-the-scenes antics at the music hall, up until the finale of course, which takes place in and around the eaves of a theatre.

It is an epic climax, and worth the wait, something of a classic even. Laird Cregar delivers so much in every scene, it is hard to keep your eyes off him. He is a little like Charles Laughton, an actor born to this, and able to win the viewer with the most subtle and considered acting.

Laird Cregar is indeed fantastic, and gives the performance of his short, short life. He would die in the year of this movie's release, 1944, and aged only 31.

Dark secrets surfacing from the past ― a housebound woman obsessed with the belief that her dead son will return at any moment ― and the moral failings of suburban life barely concealed.

All My Sons (1948) is in its modest way a film noir showcase.

Despite not being the most obvious contender for a hot-spot in the film noir canon, and despite its featuring Burt Lancaster and Edward G. Robinson, All My Sons does effectively what film noir should do. It explores fragility, secrets and demolishes the suburban American family dream.

The beauty of All My Sons lies in the source material. The play, as with the movie, builds carefully to a powerful climax that no amount of bad acting can damage ― the closing lines are always going to be powerful, if you’ve made the journey towards them.

Who wakes up screaming?

Is it Betty Grable as Jill Lynn, whose sister Vicky Lynn has been murdered after having been glamorized and launched into the entertainment world?

Is it Victor Mature as Frankie Christopher, who is accused of Vicky's death, an innocent one minute, guilty-as-sin film noir sap the next?

Is it Carole Landis as Vicky Lynn, who is the murdered girl, whose story the film closely follows as she rises via the graces and guiles of some scheming and powerful showbiz guys, to the heights of glamour and glory?

Or could it be Laird Cregar as Ed Cornell, the creepy devil of a cop, one of the best cops in all of film noir, the relentless, forceful, fearless demon-driven cop who will wait to the end of time to get his man?

Finding out who wakes up screaming in I Wake Up Screaming from 1941, an absolutely excellent early film noir, is a colourful mystery, winding and surfacing amid the shades of weirdness that make up this ahead-of-its-time film noir thriller.

One of the taglines for 1956 boxing film noir The Harder They Fall reads:

"If you think On The Waterfront hit hard... wait till you see this one!"

One likeness and possible reason for this exaggeration has to be none other than Budd Schulberg, who wrote On The Waterfront and who also wrote the novel on which this boxing movie was based.

While a fine movie, and a great late addition to the canon of boxing film noirs, The Harder They Fall doesn't have the intensity, the depth and especially not the romance and politics of On The Waterfront.

It has more boxing however. And that boxing does hit hard. Plus it has Rod Steiger, and some of the Budd Schulberg magic does rub off the streets and into the camera, in a tale of corruption, stupidity and greed at the core of the American Dream.

Nope. The States ain't no place to make it as a boxer either, it appears.

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.

Two policemen track down a gangster who uses the luggage of unsuspecting travellers to hide and retrieve drugs.

A flexible description of a raw and quite immoral late period film noir.

The mix of elements in The Lineup make it more than a random 1950s crime flick.

Within you'll find some highly procedural police procedural; a psychopathic turn from Eli Wallach; some weird cruelty and violence as packets of heroin are traced and chased around San Francisco; plus plenty great location shooting around the city itself.

Perhaps the message should be: come for Eli Wallach and stay for Don Siegel.

This may have been 1958 but you'll see Don Siegel is keen to move on with a more permissive style of film-making; he includes heroin works, he has a man in a wheelchair flung from a balcony at a skating rink; he has a really neat silencer on Eli Wallach's gun, and he has the psychopath character played by Wallach too.

Over all, this film noir is set in a darker city; not just a lawless city but The Lineup has shown that this urban environment is going crazy and is also capable of being evil for no reason; unless the reason is heroin.

At the height of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, four German exiles in Hollywood:

director Fritz Lang
playwright Bertolt Brecht
composer Hanns Eisler
and actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski

... combined their skills to make Hangmen Also Die!, a surprising film noir propaganda piece about the Czech resistance.

Twardowski plays Reinhard Heydrich, an SS Obergruppenführer and the 'Reich-Protector' of Czechoslovakia, an infamous character from history and known alternately as 'The Hangman' and 'The Butcher of Prague'.

When he is assassinated by a surgeon (played by Brian Donlevy), the city is locked down and the doctor must rely on the help of the resistance to evade capture.

Hangmen Also Die! is a fine mix of war picture, film noir and political thriller, with other surprising elements including mad Nazi darkness to the fore.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) may be considered one of the few blessings the patriarchy has offered us.

We may add the disclaimer too, that The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is not really in its entirety a film noir, although there are significant noir style, chops, attitudes and participants to make it as essential a viewing experience as any noir fiend might ever seek.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre isn't here on the Classic Film Noir website by sufferance however, and as a Humphrey Bogart film it can be enjoyed on these merits alone, and although it's an adventure tale, there is plenty paranoia and deceit on offer.

One observation from the off, and something that seems to jar somehow, is that it’s hard to read about this film without the word ‘great’ being used and overused, and then used again, and overused some more, on account of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre being a great film.

You know.

Rogue Cop (1954) opens with no fanfares and no music at all in fact. Clearly the producers were going for the music of the streets.

And what is the music of the streets?

It's the footsetp of a crooked cop, the whispering of a stool pigeon, the gasp for life of a man stabbed to death in a penny arcade, and its the sirens which open and close this film noir police procedural tale of coppers on the take.

To commence with, a grumbling burlesque dancer wanders into a penny arcade and why didn’t she know this was going to cheapen her day further, is beyond us.

But a murder quickly turns things on their tails, and the story of Rogue Cop begins.

So much of film noir takes place inside police procedural. Desks, ID parades, arguments with the boss, locker rooms, stool pigeons and bad cop / bad cop routines abound.

Death in the Garden (1956), by Luis Buñuel, is not too color, not too adventursome, nor too surreal in tone ... to be a guest on Classic Film Noir.

Death in the Garden is certainly of the film noir period, and appearing in 1956 it includes and adds to a few of film noir favourite themes, including politics, paranoia, the femme fatale, the innocent charged with crimes they didn't commit, and murder, deceit and a bag of greed.

Never could such color be called film noir, and Death in the Garden is a riot of such raucous Eastmancolor, that you'll be seeing bright green jungles in your dreams, after watching it.

Properly titled Le Mort en ce Jardin, and concerning itself with some rugged intrigue, Death in the Garden is a film of two parts, both of which have much to recommend them.

There are often political kicks to be made in film noir, and it's the same here. In fact Death in the Garden, it is said, sets out in part to play as a mirror-image of Franco’s Spain from which Buñuel exiled himself.

The theme of rebellion is to the fore and the state oppressors seem keen not only to snatch each worker's share of the natural world - in this case the men are diamond prospectors - and repress any dissent with force.

Watch out though, Simone Signoret is to hand, and as fate would have it, she has not suffered enough, working as a greedy small time prostitute in this sweaty, greed-riven male outback.

The Crooked Way, 1949, (starring John Payne, director Robert Florey) isn’t one of the celebrated film noirs.

It’s not the most convincing film of its time either, and fails to deliver the levels of paranoia that the great film noir dramas do.

It doesn’t feature a detective but follows the story of a much truer noir archetype — the WWII veteran, and his struggle to readjust to civilian life.

It is far from dull however, and perhaps The Crooked Way should be better known than it is, as it is one of the truest expressions of another 1940s Hollywood obsession — amnesia.

Boy they loved amnesia back then. It isn't just amnesia's power as a plot device. That we could almost taken for granted. What is truthful about amnesia in the forgetful halls of cinema, is that the present wipes away the past, and the past is a political battleground.

Forgetfulness is what cinema is all about, and by the 1940s the pictures had become the escapist medium par excellence, and Hollywood's thrillers sometimes reflected this.

The 1954 crime film noir thriller Private Hell 36 seems somehow familiar.

From the fade into the New York skyline and the rising incidental music, there seems to be something about it that is so well known as to be embedded in our media subconscious.

What is it?

Perhaps Private Hell 36 feels like we have just come off a commercial break.

It feels so much like the classic cop shows which were to follow on the heels of the many police procedural thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s.

This might be to do with director Don Siegel. Siegel went on to give voice to some of the best cop action of the 1970s in particular. Over a few years, for example, he offered this little run:

Coogan's Bluff (1968)
Madigan (1968)
Death of a Gunfighter (1969)
Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)
The Beguiled (1971)
Dirty Harry (1971)

Certainly these are not all cop films, and yet there's plenty crossover between the wild west and the city beat, with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne both featuring. But there is a template here for the kind of lawlessness versus the law, with a very rough divide between the two, that became the norm for 1970s TV viewership.

And Don Siegel learned it all in film noir.

Book burning, bad-ass Berlin-based Nazis, tell like it partially is in the fourth highest grossing film of 1943 ― Hitler's Children, directed by Edward Dmytryk.

Hitler's Children stars Tim Holt, Bonita Granville, and Kent Smith.

The film does not mess around in portraying the brutalities real and imaginary associated with the Hitler Youth, represented particularly by two young participants.

Both love and the church stand resolute in the face of the overwhelmeing Nazi menace, which makes a nice change from "democracy" being what everybody is hoping is going to save the day.

At the heart of things is not just an amazing love story, some interesting propaganda and a festival of horrors, but this was directed by one of film noir's then most dynamic exponents, Edward Dmytryk.

Hitler's Children is not entirely Dmytrk's trademark 'docu-drama', although it does have some documentary sequences, even a couple with the Fuhrer of the film's title featured.

It is also told in the barest of flashback which tops and tails it, and proposes to be an American teacher, based in Berlin in 1933.

It also purposes to be an adaptation of the non-fiction book of the same name by American author Gregor Ziemer. The short Disney film and short book that this comes from features the story of Hans, a boy born and raised in Nazi Germany, his indoctrination in the Hitlerjugend, and his eventual march to war.

The story of Hitler's Children is pretty different, and the hero isn't even called Hans. He's called Karl Bruner and his story tells of his zealous youth, rampant career Nazism in the Gestapo, burning love which cannot be quelled, and his demise at the hands of his evil bosses and their puritanical employment practices.

Jean-Pierre Melville takes his favourite elements from the era of the film noir crime films, and treats them to some realism.

The mood is always empty, and there is very little in the way of fun.

There are some pretty, but pretty vacant dancing girls, who are only smiling because it is their job to smile, and their repeated turns and even their rehearsal, early in the picture, are as fun as it gets.

This is Le deuxième souffle (1966), a wonderful, omenous, wide ranging and all-enveloping French film noir and gangster flick.

Because it's French film noir, there is always going to be a slight difference. Some things are taken more seriously, like the back stories of the hoods, molls, cops and gangsters.

At the samw time, some scenes make less sense than we might like them to, but we are always midway through everything, and in real life, there is no scene setting. The sadness is somewhat hidden beneath the piped smooth vibraphone-based jazz that plays in the bars and clubs, and even in some of the featured houses.

This beautiful tense, funny, hard French film noir opens suddenly showing into the finale of an escape from prison. One man dies during the escape, but the other two make it out, and we follow them on an atmospheric run through the forest, in a minimal opening credits sequence with very little music.

From there Le deuxième souffle is one long and epic criminal ramble.

It’s plastered on thick.

Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) opens with Edward G. Robinson giving a college lecture, while behind him the words SIGMUND FREUD are written on a blackboard.

If only he had turned to read that board himself.

Ten minutes later Joan Bennett, playing the strange femme fatale of the title, turns up in a see-through blouse, and asks him to her apartment to see her etchings.

That would be enough for many pictures, but in terms of the psychological goodies of film noir, The Woman in the Window probably has it in greater quantities than any other movie of the era.

The story is as fine a descent as featured in any film noir. After psychology professorRichard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) sends his wife and two children off on vacation, he sees a striking oil portrait of Alice Reed played by Joan Bennett in a storefront window.

Later, he meets the subject of the portrait, who is standing near the painting watching people gaze at it. Reed convinces Wanley to join her for drink, and thereafter there's murder, shootouts, clues, crime scenes and comic dialogues ... culminating in one of the greatest story-telling cliches of all time.

Just as they are about to take a group of less fortunate children on a riverboat ride and a special picnic, Deborah Bishop (Jeanne Crain), Rita Phipps (Ann Sothern) and Lora Mae Hollingsway (Linda Darnell) receive a letter from their mutual friend Addie Ross informing them that she has run off with one of their husbands.

However, she leaves them in suspense as to which one.

This is the setup for A Letter To Three Wives (1949), and the main body of the movie describes in portmanteau fashion, how all three marriages are in fact strained, or in some difficulty or other.

This is the work of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, one of the more versatile talents in Hollywood at the time, and he even won a Best Screenplay Academy Award for this film.

This is one reason A Letter To Three Wives finds its way on to the Classic Film Noir website, but the reason it particularly appealed was the character of Linda Darnell.

Vintage Columbia Pictures 1950 crime film noir 711 Ocean Drive, starring Edmond O'Brien, Joanne Dru and Otto Kruger, tells the story of how an ambitious and happy go lucky expert in telephony becomes a mean and vicious gang-land leader.

It's a wandering tale of crime, bookmaking and the perils of making a fast and succesful rise in the world of gangsterism.

It leads us from the small bookies of coastal California, through the high lives and low lives of its gangster antagonists, to wind up on and within the Boulder Dam in Arizona, where the gangster meets his inevitable end.

Edmond O'Brien is known from other contemporary film noirs such as The Killers, A Double Life and The Web (all 1947), to D.O.A.and Backfire in 1950.

And he does good guys just he does bad guys, and here we see him doing both.

Sure, he starts off as the wisecracking and fun telephone engineer, who likes nothing more than to bet in the horses.

But when he has the bookmaking system explained to him, and the importance of telephony, he is offered a job that he can't refuse.

Border Incident (1949), starring Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy and Howard Da Silva is a film noir set in the wild border lands between Mexico and California.

Director Anthony Mann is maybe better known for the gritty westerns he made with James Stewart in the 1950s.

However he also directed some memorable film noir favourites such as T-Men (1947), He Walked By Night (1948) and Raw Deal (1948).

Curiously, Border Incident lacks any femme fatale, or indeed any female character at all, and is an unusally violent film for its day.

Border Incident winds its way on to film noir lists, therefore, primarily because of the photography, which teems with interesting closeups, wide-angle lenses, low-angle shots, tons of shadows and light, and a lot of darkness, from which scared and tense faces emerge.

We'll dig deeper into whether this is an actual film noir or not, later.

But first it's the politics.

Cornered (1945) brings Dick Powell back to the film noir screen, and opens with him being refused a passport between London and France.

Undeterred, Powell slams his hands in his pockets, storms out of the passport office, and promptly swims the English Channel.

It’s that spirit that dominates Cornered (1945, Edward Dmytryk starring Dick Powell, Walter Slezak, Micheline Cheirel and Nina Vale.)

The war had only been over for a matter of minutes before the film noir canon kicked off a whole new epoch in cinema — a time of uncertainty, deceit and men whose identities were always up for grabs.

Generally these guys were suckered by deceitful women, but often they didn’t know which way to wear their pants to begin with.

Either way, the post-war male was wholly bruised and confused.

Who exactly was he fighting?

"Hey you — I’ve seen the sleeping act before. You know your ticket ran out the last stop!"

With these words a sassy ass bus driver drops off the world’s next noir victim on the outskirts of Walton, and in the middle of the night.

It’s Fallen Angel, a film noir starring Alice Faye, Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell, director Otto Preminger.

Stuck in Walton, 150 miles short of his destination, our anti-hero Dana Andrews wanders into the local diner, where the locals are up to a decent amount of skulduggery, worried about a missing girl called Stella.

It isn’t long before the said floozy breezes in, her legs at a dangerous angle.

She swipes the hero’s hamburger and he exits to wander the streets alone.