Pépé le Moko (1937)

Pépé le Moko (1937) is a mouche-noir French proto film noir Casbah-bound crime glamour seduction violence and poetic realist romance and intrigue police procedural classic of crime cinema and of French cinema, starring Jean Gabin and directed by Julien Duvivier.

As for films that stand the test of time and remain classics of cinema, and also classics of film noir, enough in fact to be here heralded and touted as an example of nothing less than classic film noir, then one must watch them to make the mind up, and not take any old soul's advice on that.

Watching Pépé le Moko (1937) is no duty however and will be a true pleasure, for the acting and the intrigue, for the framing and the fun, for the well constructed mis en scene and the en scene itself, of the many corridored confusions of The Casbah are the perfect and perfectly realised backdrop of this movie wonder. 

In the context of this, Julien Duvivier’s 1937 film Pépé le Moko, “le Moko” is not a surname but a nickname. It derives from the French slang term moko, which was used to describe people from the region around Toulon and Marseille in southern France, particularly dockworkers and sailors. 

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) is a racing good time of frolicsome detective work in the new vein of Sherlock Holmes as presented on the big and silver screen, pre-war and pre-nuclear, and an honest film presentation of some post-vaudevillian ideas as they are newly filtered into the service of a good time, adapting and adopting notions of what this new canon might be and might look like, in a rather nonsensical but truly Hollywood gothic-comic matter.

The year 1939 is remembered as quite an apogeeic moment of classical Hollywood cinema. It was the season of Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and many others that are routinely catalogued as monuments of an industrial art form at its height. Within that gallery, one also finds The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, released by 20th Century Fox as a continuation of the enormously successful The Hound of the Baskervilles. The two films form a diptych. 

Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca (1942) is the one of a kind classic cinema anti-Nazi tale of war time love and intrigue which regularly appears in greatest film of all time compositions and not that often in classic film noir selections nor even moderate noir canons, nor even in the non-canonical and noir at a stretch.

Funny that Casablanca was not an instant hit and funny that your first thoughts are that the special effects are not that good for the greatest film of all time. 

By which you mean that the basic investment made in this greatest film of all time seems moderate to say the least. The aeroplane and some of the attending dressing of scene, the special effects.

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) is a propaganda spy crime mystery Nazi wartime suspense serial movie thriller partially composed in the film noir style and the first of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films to be updated to the mid 20th Century and made a crucial cinematic aspect of the war effort of the 1940s.

No Way Out (1950)

No Way Out (1950) is a medical crime and fraternal revenge and racist mob race war film noir starring Sydney Poitier, Linda Darnell, Richard Widmark and Stepehen McNally. It's a tense and immense pretence with a sense of offence and it's also a noir classic, for several reasons, the least of which are the serious and more fantastic civil rights, and mass race relations race riot.

In order to historicise the idea of Black activist communities and groups, a junk yard of creeping figures emerges, but it could be argued that the multi-****** quoting racist lead has its own cliched aspects, and the dual creation, while imbalanced as racist itself, is just that, and is a creation. There never was a junkyard fight, was there?

Cry of the Werewolf (1944)

Cry of the Werewolf (1944) is a she-wolf werewolf cry of the Alsatian forties Romany-defacing uberwald supernatural proto horror lady lycanthrope darkened corridors-style thriller from the golden era of the classic film noir period of the silver screen, and although no noir to speak of, the crossover themes, designs and elements of the forties horror style and canon is so film noir adjacent that someone must appeal to the strain of horror to full understand the high standards of the film noir of the day, and it stars Nina Foch and Fritz Leiber, and was directed by Henry Levin.

Everything that we are seeing on these silver sets is a product of the formation of cinema, and the sets are the full epic of the era, hand built for thrills and lighting.

The Fly (1958)

The Fly (1958) is not a film noir. C'est pas un noir La Mouche.

The Fly (1958) is a classic nascent colour monster body horror early horror period monster thriller with legs, six legs in fact, all connected to its thorax, and those six legs are out of control science in the optimistic 1950s; gendered and queer multi-image vision of swarm politics; tragic pathos in the abject pursuit of individual destiny over marriage and family; a Lacanian mirror stage, gaze and castration anxiety Name-of-the-Father explosion of fear write large and technicolor; a biopolitics state of exception, killable life and mercy outside the law melodrama; a promissory technoscience, normal accident and precaution and public ethos thriller presentation; and a teen coming of age date and horror exploitation fantasy.

Dangerous Partners (1945)

Dangerous Partners (1945) is a mystery buddy cheapo Nazi Edward L. Cahn film noir of obscure narrative and displaying a certain laxitude of pacing and insecurity of continuity, acted as such, told as such an almost ideaful and adventuresome manner to make it a variety of multi-stranded and free form unboxed version of noir, created on the hoof out of inexpensive and still quite directionless cinematics.

The first frames of Edward L. Cahn’s Dangerous Partners are not introductions but disruptions. We enter not into a scene set up for comprehension but into a disarray of wreckage: a plane crash, bodies, survivors, and the peculiar urgency of strangers trying to force open a briefcase. 

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is a unique Orson Welles classic family drama movie, based on a novel that Welles had already successfully adapted for the radio, but which proved fraught as a film, causing studio issues, re-shooting and editing, with much footage destroyed in the day, and with all the marks of the stressful reaction of the genius Welles, to the cemented industry he sought to evolve.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is indeed in many ways a unique prospect, which while note folks this is not a film noir, it is still a major work from Orson Welles, and the Orsonian contribution to everything we adore was so profound, that inclusion beyond a mention is needed.

A Double Life (1947)

A Double Life (1947) is a melodramatic psychological theatreland ego-driven personality and jealousy possession and amnesia lousy husband film noir with ham leanings, set on and off the stages of Broadway, and directed by George Cukor, admittedly not know for his forays into film noir.

Don't be too fooled though, as Cukor has some real noir sliders and sleepers up his sleevers. There was A Woman's Face (1941) which is a solid classical noir entry for its fantastical psychological doubling and dealing and pro and de- scribing of the female. And of course he directed Gaslight (1944) one of the most seminal movie happenings of the century, for the impact its theme came to have.

Leave Her To Heaven (1945)

Leave Her To Heaven (1945) is a psychological thriller toxic love and 1940s psychopath-styled state-hopping powerful female lead with undiagnosed ADHD Technicolor sophisticates in frocks writer hero high-grossing classic film noir melodrama, with Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Craine and Vincent Price.

One of the most intriguing questions regarding Leave Her To Heaven (1945) is why it was Twentieth Century Fox's highest grossing film of the decade. 

The Steel Trap (1952)

The Steel Trap (1952) is a classic-style fifties loner opportunist trash nailbiter heist and paranoia robbery and flight from suburbia film noir starring Joseph Cotten as an weakened male noir lead bank employee who comes up with something of a scheme which once executed, unravels in a fateful manner as he tries to make various flights and escapes and handle the pressure of his actions as they crescendo to a noirish finale.

That finale is a film noir fiction, and this film noir has one of the less noir-like summations as we return to the scene of the real crime, which is suburban America bub.

The Werewolf (1956)

The Werewolf (1956) is a seminal crossover lycanthrope amnesia and mad scientist nuclear threat horror from the film noir period, ultimately playing in the wilds but using darkened noir corners in a complementary manner while being to the appeal of the newer false fact teenage or juvenile younger moderate thriller hunter body transformation crowd of the 1950s.

The Werewolf (1956) yes, this is one of the odd mid noir early non horror kind of tragic costume wilderness wandering gunshot redneck get the mob with a raving wildfire of burning torches.

Main Street After Dark (1945)

Main Street After Dark (1945) is a bunco-detail  criminal family crime drama pawn-brokered pistol packing mugging conspiracy Edward L. Cahn cheapso randomly told film noir thriller, etched into the back of the noir alley paper hoardings, seen only when you pull away from the possibility of sensible thriller cinematics, says The Noircades Project.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is an Alfred Hitchcock British-period thriller proto-noir proto-Hitchcock proto-innocent person swept up in intrigue psychological and action exciter.

In his contemporary review of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Forsyth Hardy noted the absence of expressive use of sound, especially when compared to earlier Hitchcock works like Murder! or Blackmail. However, while the film lacks overt or showy sound techniques, it marks a significant evolution in Hitchcock’s handling of sound. 

Mission to Moscow (1943)

Mission to Moscow (1943) is a lengthy docu-style pro-Stalinist American mid-War political and diplomatic film noir tour of pre-World War Two Europe and the Soviet Union, displaying Nazi activity in the USA and in Germany and offering a vaguely unique 120 minutes of cinematic earnest as diplomat Joseph E. Davies, a handpicked business choice by President Roosevelt, featured in shadow, moves pleasantly and occasionally with a furrowed brow through the landscapes of the Nazi world of confusion which presaged the fatal conflagration of the early to mid 1940s.

The Sellout (1952)

The Sellout (1952) is a journalism and media small town crooked cop courtroom and corruption kangaroo and criminal court repping high class low profile film noir drama.

Little known and little loved The Sellout (1952) is a film noir gem, and buzzes with tension and all the undercurrents of psychological and physical force that noirs up the focused greed and determination of the rounded and flawed characters of its small town setting.

Black Fury (1935)

Black Fury (1935) is a labour relations coal country Pennsylvania-based Warner Bros. working class mining rough-shoddily Slav impersonating private police force versus striking miners based on a historic incident melodrama, with a poor American mining community relentlessly portrayed as a mob of easily swayed poverty stricken proles, versus the kind of private company police force that used to only a few years earlier, in 1929, beat to death striking workers that happened to be standing under the wrong club et sturdy baton.

That is in certain fact the story of John Barcoski who immigrated in to the USA in 1906, who was Polish, and who was beaten to death in Pennsylvannia by the PA's Coal and Iron Police on February 10th, 1929.

Miami Exposé (1956)

Miami Exposé (1956) is a crummy cop Miami based swamp wrangling political conniving over legalised gambling in Florida bribery and murder and faked death airboat and Cadillac bright white light cruiser film noir with first rate desk to camera footage and decent moments of driving and aerial scenery around the fastest growing city in America, decade after decade, the city that was never a town and the tropical miracle that is Miami.

Fred F. Sears, a director tethered to Columbia Pictures and the watchful eye of producer Sam Katzman, carved out a career from the frayed cloth of low-budget filmmaking. His oeuvre, stitched together from an array of genres including science fiction, juvenile delinquency, and war-time tales, finds a peculiar resonance within the crime genre. 

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Sullivan's Travels (1941) is a drifter-narrative social message self-reflecting Hollywood blockbuster role reversal comedy social commentary prison and road movie media satire that looks at the business of the movie franchise ('Ants in your Pants 1939') in which the differences between worthy art and cinematic entertainment is pressed, as well as the truest social politics of the queer and socialist civil rightists kind

No it is not a film noir, c'est pas un noir mes flics et mesdames!

But there is still a reason it is here and many reasons it is relevant to our defence of the film noir form.

The social politics are true insofar as they are presented in 1941 before the mass media hold upon messaging defined social justice into some kind of communist nightmare.

Killer's Kiss (1955)

Killer's Kiss (1955) is a moody voiceover and flashback classic boxing and voyeuristic intrigue-driven Stanley Kubrick low budget auteuristic film noir which distils elements of the style into a commercial feature film, almost in fact a moulding of the medium by the master-to-be into a noir-by-numbers example of the form as it was then being recognised by the more observant and critical critics and students of the cinema, as it began to cleave itself away from the staid almost televisually-based look and feel of the mid-decade.

That can be said because 1950s noir, and noir of 1955 and beyond, did tend toward production with a television set in mind, and Kubrick's take, while featuring television as a minor but key plot component, does lean with an artistic eye into the shadowy roots of the style, opting into darkness and closed up lighting as a final look.

The Ghost Ship (1943)

The Ghost Ship (1943) is a low key Val Lewton maritime murder psychological thriller suspense film noir melodrama of high seas horror mania and psychopathy and serial killer highly focused mania, with homicidal homoerotics on the deadly foggy misty waters of the evil portions of the silver screen's fantasies of what it might mean to be on the ocean, in a kind of Conradian high modern mixup of steamer mythos at its zenith worst, its best and most deadly. The insane Captain Stone.

It isn't what you think. There are no ghosts.

The Leopard Man (1943)

The Leopard Man (1943) is a Val Lewton Jacques Tourneur pre-serial killer era serial killer horror thriller chiller film noir filler large cat-themed dark side proto just about everything golden era silver screen classic of what became the horror genre, although it might be for another day to require of the LLMs to ask what the exact genre trajectory comprises that runs from Val and Jacques productions such as The Leopard Man (1943) and Cat People (1942) to Saw (2004); Saw II (2005); Saw III (2006); Saw IV (2007); Saw V (2008); Saw VI (2009); Saw 3D (2010); Jigsaw (2017); Spiral (2021); and Saw X (2023). 

Jeez I asked the LLM what it thought about that and guess what it was happy to spit. We will return to that.

King Creole (1958)

King Creole (1958) is an Elvis Presley Michael Curtiz rock n roll noir juvenile tearaway love and crime street tough southern violent young love tale of parental and filial failure in the homes and streets and schools of 1950s America.

If there should be a place, a note on celluloid, where Elvis and film noir should meet, then King Creole will be that. It was always your favourite Elvis film and while it is good for an Elvis film, nay in fact a veritable Citizen Kane of Elvislry compared to most of the mush he filmed, and despite hosting Michael Curtiz in the master's chair, it is still not so great a movie. We may force a noir pairing with Jailhouse Rock (1957). The film that took youth culture to prison.

We're No Angels (1955)

We're No Angels (1955) is a Michael Curtiz Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray Christmas themed inappropriate island based prison break comedy in full studio colour as the trio fun and blunder through some uncanny voyeuristic crapulent more than semi-sexist kind of misery as comedy experience as they play three escapees from Devil's Island, the penal colony of Cayenne (French: Bagne de Cayenne), commonly known as Île du Diable, which was a French penal colony that operated for 100 years, from 1852 to 1952, and officially closed in 1953, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana.

Ladies in Retirement (1941)

Ladies in Retirement (1941) is a historical woman's picture psychological social thriller Cockney talkin gothic Victoriana shadows in the marshes foggy soggy film noir thieven and murder drama of sisterly crazed dead bird collecting feminist examination of the pressures social, psychological and detrimental to the capable woman in the society of yore, as dramatists of 1939, a curious and exciting drama from the times when plays made films.

In the murky domain between madness and decorum, Charles Vidor's 1941 film Ladies in Retirement emerges as an exquisitely wrought chamber piece of deceit, loyalty, and murder. 

Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent (1946) is a paranoid women lousy husband drama woman's picture-style essential woman's picture film noir story of riches, jealousy, egregious abuses of domestic trust, and all out manic equine-based murder plot around a mystery Mitchum-alike sibling and significant and pressing hunky love interest in a rough leather jacket.

Undercurrent starts with normality, suburbia in the snow, the very surface that film noir was about to break, when 1946 spilled into the century and sped the future on with its weirdismal messaging about the martyrdom and murderdoom of wifely women.

Whistle Stop (1946)

Whistle Stop (1946) is a film noir tale of crazed small town jealousy bursting at the seams with a lousy husband and lousy boyfriend competing over the most beautiful woman of all time in a booze-based gamblathon with train image-ery a-plenty and passing trains and honking trains obviously while whistle stop motifery abounds in a darkened noir manner at the end of hope, as George Raft employs his incredibly still face, and Tom Conway twitches his most incredibly smooth and moustachioed face, and both faces are punched in booze-based and non booze-based rage, and Ava Gardner deploys her incredibly beautiful face.

Island of Lost Men (1939)

Island of Lost Men (1939) is a undercover cop exotica yellowface Teutonic expatriate adventure crime romp up the dark rivers of the racists century and hard into the orienticals in more ways than just the music and the music is bullying and harassing of a certain type of perfectly exampled nature of the era, for which engaging in ridicule as a proceeding was the tone of reckoning, even for horror, in its serious moments of introspection.

What is horror? It's a bit like being stuck in a watery hole, maybe as in The Deer Hunter (1978). The young Broderick Crawford finds out in Island of Lost Men (1939). Broderick Crawford may be the most film noir aspect of this non-noir branch reform of the form.

Island of Doomed Men (1940)

Island of Doomed Men (1940) is an undercover cop prison exploitation lousy husband film noir adventure shocker about sadistic capitalistic island owner in conspiratorial league with the US prison system, who runs a mean slave labour based penal island where he keeps his wife a captive, and where he is bothered to his downfall by a domestic monkey.

Peter Lorre is that island owner in Island of Doomed Men (1940), the prosaically named Stephen Darnel who runs a mean slave colony, with a sophisticated home enclave of dreams, flowers, a kitchen, grand piano, electric fence and a domestic monkey.

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

Portrait of Jennie (1948) is a supernatural romantic drama artist-as-hero sepia black and white and at the same time technicolor David O. Selznick in the tradition of quality vehicle for Jennifer Jones magical and strange high-value and purified mystical love movie mad hard upon the crest of the film noir wave and so shares not a few virtues with that immortal form, the noir, the form by which it shall today be judged.

For it is a film not necessary of noir, but yet does look to the most over stylised elements of our favourite film language, in fantasy and in shadow.

Kid Galahad (1937)

Kid Galahad (1937) is an ingenue in the ring classic boxing sports and bellboy Humphrey Bogart is the baddie high-thirties Michael Curtiz greatest director of all time steamer with a floof performance from Bette Davis and a flouncy show from Bette Davis' own acting discovery Jane Bryan, and Wayne Morris, Wayne who is his own mystery man of film noir, which shall be laid out a little below, while this Curtiz cut is not film noir, nor even not a little or with a slight flicker of noir, which oddly made it likeable material for the main event which appears to be the 1962 starring Elvis Presley remake of the matter.

Ingenue in the ring country bumpkin with his trouser legs cut off by a near blow jobbing Humphrey Bogart must have looked good on Elvis too, because he is as much of a bellhop as he is a boxer, and Wayne Morris, mystery man of film noir is the same.

Deception (1946)

Deception (1946) is an operatic gothic jealousy classical music elite queer coded grandly-themed and doomatically scored outre and artistic Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains film noir from the paragon days of the most virtuoso anti-virtuos black-hearted form of silver-screened entertainment that ever did bedevil the airwaves of the cinematic mind. This was Marshall McCluhan's favourite film of all time.

Maybe it wasn't but then again maybe it was. Only the Large Language Models will ever know that now.

The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947)

The Two Mrs Carrolls (1947) is a lousy husband paranoid woman blackmail murder and poison mystery manor house art and intrigue infidelity and obsession Mark Hellinger portraits of women in noir film noir starring Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Alexis Smith and Nigel Bruce.

You might imagine that this melange of mild madness and misty focused love and lust has often been misapprehended as an ungainly hybrid of overwrought melodrama and tepid suspense. Such assessments have become axiomatic, yet they do not withstand close inspection. 

Though the film remains aesthetically uneven, it exerts a strange and unrelenting fascination, anchored by peculiar tonal shifts and grotesque exaggerations that reveal, rather than obscure, its psychological acuity.

Tiger in the Smoke (1956)

Tiger in the Smoke (1956) is a fog-bound British returning veteran Limey street gang treasure and deception paranoid woman Post-War London underworld adventure thriller film noir, and a movie notable not just for its atmospheric River Thames silent credits, but the copious amounts of fog, mist and vapour within its sets and dramaturgy — for no other movie of the era or indeed of any era, including many a Victorian horror epic, has more wool-thick smog and smoke in it, than this modest mirk of gloaming pea-soupery.

You already like Donald Sinden, you may not know it, but here in this heroic foggy fugue, you've come to love him, before anyone else had met him.

The Sea Wolf (1941)

The Sea Wolf (1941) is a nautical noir ghost ship of shame and cruelty dramatic abduction and high seas wrecking crew medical and maritime madness Jack London adapted tale of intersecting American narratives combining the frontier of the sea with the oldest narrative tropes known to the continent, including the olden mania of the rogue seamaster and the anti-Nietzschean struggle for the victory of normalcy over ubermenshcary.

Michael Curtiz's 1941 adaptation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf occupies a peculiar intersection of seafaring adventure, psychological realism, and the film noir sensibility emerging in Hollywood during the wartime period. 

Crossfire (1947)

Crossfire (1947) is a classic film noir returning veteran anti-Semitic military procedural Hollywood Ten produced and directed murder chase thriller with Roberts Ryan, Young and Mitchum, in a night-long low-budget detection and paranoia drama.

Known and loved as a classic of its kind, Crossfire (1947) is best known as being a fore-runner to the justices of HUAC and features many heavily Communised individuals including actors, writer, director and producers, and in fact bearing that in mind it is not surprising that this red-fest of socialist freedom and civic principles in the face of any kind of incipient fascism was always going to be a McCarthy favourite. The film in fact premiered at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City on July 22, 1947 and only a few months later producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), becoming part of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.

Der Ruf (1949)

Der Ruf (1949) is a returning professor as opposed to returning veteran post World War Two post-Nazi anti-anti-Semitism in German society drama Trümmerfilm starring Fritz Kortner and Johanna Hofer and directed by Josef von Báky.

Josef von Báky's 1949 film Der Ruf, known in English as The Last Illusion, occupies a unique and unsettling place in the postwar cinematic reckoning with Nazism. The film unearths the persistence of fascist ideologies within a defeated Germany, where the symbolic collapse of the Third Reich fails to extinguish the embers of antisemitic animus. 

Man with the Gun (1955)

Man with the Gun (1955) is a lone gunfighter town in distress drifter narrative gunslinger and anarchy western with noirlike tones, and starring Robert Mitchum and Jan Sterling.

In the scorched townscape of Sheridan, 1955’s Man with the Gun offers a monochrome portrait of institutional paralysis and a solitary man’s iron remedy. 

At the heart of this tight-lipped Western, Robert Mitchum stalks the frame with coiled menace as Clint Tollinger, a man whose profession is extermination. 

The Razor's Edge (1946)

The Razor's Edge (1946) is an intergenerational returning veteran historical drama episodic male point of view romance adventure two and a half hour Somerset Maugham worldliness versus spirituality adaptation which was a huge romantic hit in its time, and which owes little to film noir, but offers a stable and repetitive cascading style of romance story that is a soft-soap kind of storytelling, offering the purest kind of escape known to 1946.

This is not a film noir, and yet within it lurks the genes of the style not quite activated, but present as the underscored factual spiritual well from which draws a grabbing interest, between the snogs and high-class encounters. In the 1940s they did not have slacker movies, but they did have loafer movies, and this is one.

Chase A Crooked Shadow (1958)

Chase A Crooked Shadow (1958) is a paranoid woman assumed identity deceit and fleecing meticulous murder chamber drama British film noir with subverting notions of expectation as well as dark and shadowy double-play and in this case situated on coastal Spain, starring Anne Baxter as a typically doubting covers-gripping shocked and terrified femme indoors, with a special twist, and a great cast of Alexander Knox, Herbert Lom, Richard Todd and Faith Brook.

Michael Anderson's 1958 suspense thriller Chase a Crooked Shadow is a taut chamber drama that simultaneously flaunts its artificiality and derives power from its formal claustrophobia. Conceived as a British answer to the Hitchcockian mystery, the film cloaks its familiar conceit in an elegant mise-en-scène and haunting moral ambiguity. 

Blind Date (1959)

Blind Date (1959) is a Losey Limey London-based violence-against-women flashback and sophisticated murder mystery puzzle artist anti-hero police procedural erotic class and privilege social corruption film noir, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Hardy Krüger, Stanley Baker and Michelene Presle, with extra Gordon Jackson for the hardy Brit fan that likes a bit of the Scotch roughage in uniform.

In 1959, amid the twilight of post-war certainties and the emergent undercurrents of cultural upheaval in Britain, Joseph Losey released Blind Date (retitled Chance Meeting for its American audience). 

The Invisible Man (1933)

The Invisible Man (1933) is a mad scientist science fiction invisibility-themed Universal horror classic monsters franchise series franchise commencement classic of pre-Code cinema, horror, formative science fiction adventure and escapade drama adaptation of a classic grotesque romance novel from the late 1890s, speculating on the individual and social ramifications of a crazed and powerful narrative fantasy of invisibility.

In a crummy British village populated by simple superstitious beer loving vaudevillians there is a sudden and genuine spooking as dramatic imagery blasts across the snow stormed screen and a demanding and aristocratic stranger in wrap appears as some kind of local uber mensch among the peasants, settling himself in an inn in one of the best openings in cinema, one of the best of the 1930s, one of the best of all decades indeed.

Yellow Sky (1949)

Yellow Sky (1949) is a dark and noiresque based-on-The Tempest-by-William Shakespeare salt flats ghost town band of robbers no honour among thieves atmospheric ensemble cast film noir western pistol-packin tomboy cinematic presentation of many common noir and western themes.

Super fine composition work complements Gregory Peck's desire to do good and right which compromises his loyalty to his gang of evil-doers and is driven by his growing love for the tomboy in question, played by Anne Baxter, inexplicably living on the edge with her old grandpops on an abandoned movie set.

His love is more than forceful, and not just because this is the 1940s, but rape is more than suggested in their first sexual encounter in which Peck angrily forces himself upon Baxter. She resists but later relents.

The Walking Hills (1949)

The Walking Hills (1949) is a hybrid treasure-hunt and hunted man adventure Western film noir in which a disparate cast of archetypes head into Death Valley to look for some lost gold, that they believe to be buried in the sands known as the walking hills, for their ability to shift and change topographical form.

The sand shifts and the land changes, and there is sand blown in storms and sand erodes the hard materials of civilisation, before blowing into people's souls, shovelled into the wind, and there is a shovel fight and a lot of shifty eyes across the campfire, as well as brilliant blues music from Josh White.

Devil's Doorway (1950)

Devil's Doorway (1950) is a returning veteran race relations injustice on the range and one man against the system social commentary action adventure wild western movie with film noir leanings, and one that is significantly and surprisingly better than its black face or whatever and inappropriate Native American portrayals this represents, which are not well done and which might be off-putting for any modern kinda film observers.

For example, Native Americans have never and would never refer to themselves as 'Indians', as they do here, even a patent absurdity in 1950.

Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway (1950) is a significant yet underappreciated western film that offers a haunting portrayal of racial discrimination in the American West. 

My Darling Clementine (1946)

My Darling Clementine (1946) is a poetic, mythic Western rather than a noir-inflected one. But yet it surfaces in film noir lists as crossover material, and the big critickers of the century do like to hat-tip it as a noiresque style of western adventure.

I’m curious about the film noir style in My Darling Clementine, noting moody cinematography, deep shadows, lawlessness, and moral ambiguity. Characters like Doc Holliday and Linda Darnell enrich this dark, personal narrative.

Although My Darling Clementine (1946) is most often celebrated as a classical John Ford Western rather than a noir-inflected film, a few stylistic and thematic elements overlap with the film noir sensibility. Below are some of the key noir-like components you can find in the film.

I Shot Jesse James (1949)

I Shot Jesse James (1949) is a wild west historical-mythical hero-plagued-by-guilt and self-disgust film noir western concerning one of the pivotal motions in the story of the national formation of the super-historic late nineteenth century force that was to become the United States, retelling in its suitably sanitised and Samuel Fullerised force to story of the the shooting of Jesse James by Robert Ford, whose name inspired a rhyme scheme that draws the tourists and the film makers to this very day.

It is a rocky period in history and it is a question indeed as to whether I Shot Jesse James (1949) might categorically qualify for either the western noir or the historical noir designation, for weirdly in effect it is both.

The Gunfighter (1950)

The Gunfighter (1950) is a lone gun-fighter facing early celebrity in the nascent wild west western revenge chase and showdown saloon and range estranged child and wife thriller starring Gregory Peck, Karl Malden, Helen Westcott and directed by Henry King. 

In the noirlands of the wild west and in the imaginations of the film makers and narrative makers of the high era of American creativity, a film such as The Gunfighter (1950) carries many a surprise.

Lust for Gold (1949)

Lust for Gold (1949) is a bookend narration-style lost goldmine murder greed and deception lousy husband historical western meets modern day media film noir of the western stamp, one of several noirs which combine past and present in a treasure huntin narrative.

All of which is made perfectly desperate by the acting of Ida Lupino, who does in the great noir tradition perform the most desperate of acting styles, making of everything a high stakes showdown, as is fitting of her role as the First Lady of Noir.