In contemplating Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943), one encounters not merely another instalment in the venerable Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce canon but, to borrow from my own reflection, « une sorte de liturgie du mystère » — a liturgy of mystery. I like to say things in French, sometimes. It doesn't just sound good., It adds extra meaning, I know it.
Film Noir
Classic Film Noir exposes the myths by which we fulfil our desires and lays flat the means by which we created the audiovisual dispositif — sex — murder — and the suburban dream — 1940 to 1960 — FEATURING: amnesia, paranoid women, lousy husbands, red scare and HUAC, boxing, drifter narratives, crooked cops, home invasion noir, docu-style noir, returning veterans, #KEFAUVER! cowboy noir, vacuum cleaners in film noir, outré noir, espionage noir — and more.
Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943)
Touch of Evil (1958)
If it lacks the gravitas of Welles' debut, it compensates by revealing a director entirely freed from the burden of prestige, indulging instead in excess, sleaze, formal genius, and creative destruction. It is a masterclass in cinematic rule-breaking that turns every aesthetic choice into a moral judgment.
Dial M For Murder (1954)
Dial M For Murder (1954) is an Alfred Hitchcock Technicolor dual-strip polarised 3D but always subsequently seen in 2D lousy husband telephone-noir based-on-a play home invasion murder and police and detective procedural intriguer starring Grace Kelly, Ray Milland, Robert Cummings, Anthony Dawson and John Williams.
La Chienne (1931)
The Return of the Fly (1959)
A minor creature, buzzing at the margin of the sublime, a mote in the cathedral of science, this film describes like no other the moment when the man and the insect pass through the molecular eye together, the universe commits a grammatical error, and republishes cheap. What emerges is not human, not fly, but a grotesque synthesis: the moral algebra of hubris incarnate. A catalogue entry in worst sequels?
The Captive City (1952)
Super strong in its categories, this noir is nearly a classic film noir, and maybe even is such, certainly it is a class film noir, if not a classique. Close up paranoid photography and murder, newspaper men against the odds, small town atmosphere to perfection and an intriguing thug hood and mookery-style delivery under professional organised crookery.
Circle of Danger (1951)
The Ray Milland Season Unfolds Without Haste
Circle of Danger (1951) is an American in Britain post-WW2 investigative mystery Limey home nations road movie of mystery with locale-driven shooting in London, Wales and in the Highlands, making a virtue of Patricia Roc's infectious smile and Ray Milland's hatted and haunted pillar to post look as he uncovers a vaguely understandable plot that I am not sure now after two viewings — has ever been explained.
The circle itself, the circle of danger, the rotunda of peril, is specifically not quite as convoluted as it might otherwise be in a film noir.
Suddenly (1954)
Yeah this is a town in which the lil boys want to be police officers when they grow up. The truth was break America fairly soon, but for the time this suburban aspic is a gelatinous capturing of some of the best known American dream-style tropes, characters and idiomes en scene.
Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)
The Uninvited (1944)
The Ray Milland Season Advances at a Crawl
The Uninvited (1944) is a supernatural clifftop haunted house, Cornish clifftop haunted house paranoid woman writer as hero portraits in noir gothic horror ghost chiller love and romance drama with a dog shot by Lewis Allen and starring Ray Milland, Gail Russell, Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, Alan Napier, and Cornelia Otis Skinner.
Few films of the 1940s reach the uncanny stillness and dignified unease as well as the fantastic silliness and dignified quease of The Uninvited (1944).
Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942)
The Thief (1952)
The Thief (1952) is a non-verbal one of a kind atomic age location-shot nuclear secrets classic Ray Milland and Russell Rouse film noir, both innovative and inventive, curious and classic, telling the engrossingly spun paranoid tale of one man's turning Communist spy and his discovery and having to go on the run, with escape and capture fantasy played out across New York, in some most famously shot locals and corners.
Pépé le Moko (1937)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)
Casablanca (1942)
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)
No Way Out (1950)
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)
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)
Dangerous Partners (1945)
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 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)
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)
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)
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) 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)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
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)
The Sellout (1952)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
It isn't what you think. There are no ghosts.
The Leopard Man (1943)
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)
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)
Ladies in Retirement (1941)
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 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)
Island of Lost Men (1939)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.