The Sleeping City (1950)
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Otto Preminger's classic film noir offering captures the common postwar struggle to get ahead, and one man's balancing act between two women. Dana Andrews stars as a drifter named Eric Stanton, who, after landing in a small California town, falls in love with Stella (Linda Darnell), a diner waitress. She makes it clear that she'll have nothing to do with Eric unless he has some money, so he hatches a plan to marry June Mills (Alice Faye), a wealthy reclusive spinster who is in love with him. Unfortunately, right after the wedding, Stella turns up dead, and the blame is placed on Eric.
This unusual and worthwhile black-and-white film noir was one of the first movies to deal with issues of anti-Semitism.
Rose Loomis and her older, gloomier husband, George, are vacationing at a cabin in Niagara Falls, N.Y. The couple befriend Polly and Ray Cutler, who are honeymooning in the area. Polly begins to suspect that something is amiss between Rose and George, and her suspicions grow when she sees Rose in the arms of another man. While Ray initially thinks Polly is overreacting, things between George and Rose soon take a shockingly dark turn.
No-nonsense San Francisco industrial whiz Walter Williams's two-timing wife and her lover plot to do her husband in, but Williams survives the "accident" and the lover is burned beyond recognition while driving Williams's car. Half-dazed, Williams stumbles into a moving van that takes him to idyllic Larkspur, Idaho, where newspaper stories of his "death" jog his memory. While recuperating and plotting his eventual return and revenge, Williams falls in love with Marsha, an auto mechanic. But when Williams finally gets back to San Francisco, he's charged with the lover's murder.
The Naked City portrays the police investigation that follows the murder of a young model. A veteran cop is placed in charge of the case and he sets about, with the help of other beat cops and detectives, finding the girl's killer.
Jeff Bailey seems to be a mundane gas station owner in remote Bridgeport, CA. He is dating local girl Ann Miller and lives a quiet life. But Jeff has a secret past, and when a mysterious stranger arrives in town, Jeff is forced to return to the dark world he had tried to escape.
Unsuspecting Mr. Dietrichson becomes increasingly accident prone after his icily calculating wife encourages him to sign a double indemnity policy proposed by a smooth-talking insurance agent. Against a backdrop of distinctly California settings, the partners in crime plan the perfect murder to collect the insurance. Perfect until a claims manager gets a familiar feeling of foul play and pursues the matter relentlessly.
Private Detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a rich family. Before the complex case is over, he's seen murder, blackmail, and what might be love.
After her cheating husband leaves her, Mildred Pierce proves she can become independent and successful, but can't win the approval of her spoiled daughter.
One evening, Hammer gives a ride to Christina, an attractive hitchhiker on a lonely country road, who has escaped from the nearby lunatic asylum. Thugs waylay them and force his car to crash. When Hammer returns to semi-consciousness, he hears Christina being tortured until she dies. Hammer, both for vengeance and in hopes that "something big" is behind it all, decides to pursue the case.
Dixon 'Dix' Steele, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter needs to adapt a trashy novel. At a night club, the hat-check girl, Mildred Atkinson is engrossed reading it. Too tired to read the novel, he asks Mildred to go home with him, to explain the plot. Later that night, Mildred is murdered and Steele is a prime suspect, his record of violence when angry goes against him.
Two professional killers invade a small town and kill a gas station attendant, "the Swede," who's expecting them. Insurance investigator Reardon pursues the case against the orders of his boss, who considers it trivial. Weaving together threads of the Swede's life, Reardon uncovers a complex tale of treachery and crime, all linked with gorgeous, mysterious Kitty Collins.
Two carefree young travellers make the mistake of their lives when they pick up a mysterious, and slightly psychotic, hitch-hiker who never closes his right eye -- even when he sleeps!
An American pulp writer arrives in post-WWII Vienna only to find that the friend who waited for him is killed under mysterious circumstances. The ensuing mystery entangles him in his friend's involvement in the black market, with the multinational police, and with his Czech girlfriend.
A drunk cop investigates the murder of a sexy blonde. The policeman -who can't remember the night before - starts getting worried when all fingers began pointing at him.
A romantic drifter gets caught between a corrupt tycoon and his voluptuous wife.
An artist suffering from mental problems from his experiences during the war goes to Acapulco on his honeymoon. Soon young women are turning up dead in the area, and the ex-GI comes to believe he might be responsible, as he has long stretches where he can't remember anything.
Ex con turned private investigator Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) suspects someone is following him and maybe even trying to kill him. With the assistance of his spunky secretary, Lucille Ball, he dives deep into a mystery in search of answers.
Danny Haley's bookie operation is shut down, so he and his pals need money; when Danny meets Arthur Winant, a sucker from out of town, he decoys him into a series of poker games where eventually Winant loses $5000 that isn't his... then hangs himself. But it seems Winant had a shadowy, protective elder brother who believes in personal revenge.
A young Navy sailor has one night to find out why a woman was killed and he ended up with a bag of money after a drinking blackout.
Orson Welles plays an escaped Nazi war criminal. After the war, he fled to the United States and assumed the name of Charles Rankin. Engaged to the unsuspecting daughter of a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and posing as a college professor, he had the perfect cover. No one would think to look for a notorious Nazi war criminal in the sacred precincts of the Harper's School...
In this film noir classic, a revenge-seeking gangster (Dennis O'Keefe) is sent to prison after being framed for a crime he didn't commit. After seducing a beautiful young woman, he uses her to help him carry out his plot for vengeance, leading him to the crazy pyromaniac (Raymond Burr) who set him up.
"Kilas" (a Portuguese misrepresentation of the English word "killers") is the nickname of a petty con-man who gets involved with a deadly ring of spies.
Matthew Sweet explores his rules of 1940s and 50s American film noir thrillers: *Choose a dame with no past and a hero with no future *Use no fiction but pulp fiction *See America through a stranger's eyes *Make it any colour as long as it's black *It ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. T-Men is a semidocumentary style 1947 film noir shot in black-and-white. The film was directed by Anthony Mann with cinematography by noted noir cameraman John Alton. The B-movie is featured in Visions Of Light: The Art Of Cinematography (1992) documentary for the drama's use of lighting. Description above from the Wikipedia article T-Men, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Night and the City (1950) is a film noir based on the novel by Gerald Kersh, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney. Shot on location in London, the plot evolves around an ambitious hustler whose plans keep going wrong.
Bogey's on the lam and Bacall's at his side in Dark Passage, Delmer Daves' stylish film-noir thriller that's the third of four films Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together. Bogart is Vincent Parry who, framed for murder, escapes San Quentin and soon emerges from plastic surgery with a new face. Bacall is Irene Jansen, Vincent's lone ally. In a supporting role, Agnes Moorehead portrays Madge, a venomous harpy who finds pleasure in the unhappiness of others. The chemistry of the leads is undeniable, and they augment it here with exceptional tenderness. Exceptional too are the atmospheric San Francisco locations and the imaginative camera work that shows Vincent's point of view - but not his face - until the bandages are removed. Lest Irene get ideas, the post-surgery Vincent tells her: "Don't change yours. I like it just as it is."
This film noir stars Alan Ladd as a war veteran framed for the murder of his own wife and follows his search for the real murderer. Veronica Lake plays the sultry femme fatale who provides unexpected help.
The Horatio Alger parable gets the film noir treatment with the redoubtable Edmund OâBrien as a whip-smart telephone technician who moves up the ladder of a Syndicate gambling empire in Southern California until distracted by an inconveniently married Joanne Dru and his own greed. Ripped from the headlines of the 1950 Kevaufer Organized Crime Hearings, this fast-moving picture is laden with location sequences shot in Los Angeles, the Hoover Dam and Palm Springs including the famous Doll House watering hole on North Palm Canyon Drive!
The Comic Strip team return for a special 50s-style 'fugitive' film noir spoof. The 60-minute film, penned by Peter Richardson and Pete Richens, follows Prime Minister Tony Blair (Stephen Mangan), wanted for murder and on the run. Escaping from Number 10 and leaving behind his adoring wife Cherie (Catherine Shepherd), Tony vows to clear his name no matter what the consequences.
A WWII Coast Guard veteran, Lt. Scott Burnett (Robert Ryan), is plagued by nightmares of his combat days. One day, he meets a woman, Peggy Butler (Joan Bennett), walking on a beach, picking up pieces of wood. Butler is married to a grumpy, blind painter, Ted Butler (Charles Bickford). Despite his affections for his fiancée Eve (Nan Leslie), whose father is a boat builder, Scott falls in love with Peggy and soon breaks off the engagement. Peggy reveals that she blinded her husband years earlier by throwing a glass at him during an ugly spat, ruining his career and her own ambitions to be an upper-class socialite. Scott fears that Ted is suspicious that he is having an affair with Peggy and becomes so paranoid that he begins to believe that Ted is faking his blindness â and sets out to prove it. This was the fifth and final American film by the great French writer-director Jean Renoir.
1952 black and white Cold War spy film, entirely without dialog
Illicit lovers plot to kill the woman's older husband.
Army Lieutenant Halliday, accused of stealing the Army payroll, pursues the real thief on a frantic chase through Mexico aided by the thief's ex-girlfriend and is in turned being chased by his accuser, Capt. Blake.
A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent-film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.
Based on the novel Low Company. One of the most peculiar film noirs of the 1940s stars Barry Sullivan as a small-time hood who suffers a mental breakdown as his big plans begin to crumble. Beautiful Belita is the slumming society girlfriend who only fuels his paranoia.
A man on the run in the Far East is mistaken for an undercover cop.
The film tells the story of a well-planned robbery of an armored car when it stops at a sports stadium. Yet, the heist goes awry, and a tough Los Angeles cop named Cordell (Charles McGraw) is in hot pursuit.
After a woman shoots a man to death, a damning letter she wrote raises suspicions.
Frank Johnson, sole witness to a gangland murder, goes into hiding and is trailed by Police Inspector Ferris, on the theory that Frank is trying to escape from possible retaliation. Frank's wife, Eleanor, suspects he is actually running away from their unsuccessful marriage. Aided by a newspaperman, Danny Leggett, Eleanor sets out to locate her husband. The killer is also looking for him, and keeps close tabs on Eleanor.
A mystery woman is a murder suspect's only alibi for the night of his wife's death. Based on a story by noir scribe Cornell Woolrich.
Filmed some 18 months before its release, Conflict is one of two melodramas in which Humphrey Bogart self-consciously portrayed a wife murderer (the other was The Two Mrs. Carrolls). Bogie plays unhappily married Richard Mason, who concocts a meticulous scheme to kill his shrewish wife, Kathryn (Rose Hobart), so that he'll be free to marry her sister, Evelyn (Alexis Smith).
James Cagney directs this remake of the film noir classic This Gun for Hire.
The feature-film debut of famed director Louis Malle is an interesting, modern film noir with the classic theme of lovers plotting to kill the husband and make it look like suicide (reminiscent of The Postman Always Rings Twice). Jeanne Moreau gives an astonishing performance, perverse but naive as she leads her young lover down a path that can only lead to doom for both of them.
Tough NYC police detective Dixon misses out on a promotion because of his record of roughing up suspects. When accidentally kills a suspect in a murder case he plants clues to absolve himself. But when the father of a woman he recently fell in love is accused of the crime his plan looks like back firing.
Petty crook and cop-killer Martin Rome, in bad shape from wounds in the hospital prison ward, still refuses to help slimy lawyer Niles clear his client by confessing to another crime. Police Lt. Candella must check Niles' allegation; a friend of the Rome family, he walks a tightrope between sentiment and cynicism. When Martin fears Candella will implicate his girlfriend Teena, he'll do anything to protect her. How many others will he drag down to disaster with him?
A seductive woman gets an innocent professor mixed up in murder.
Newspaper reporter John McGuire plunges into a nightmare of guilt, fearing that his "evidence" has sentenced the wrong man to death. A stunning example of cinematic expressionism, cited by many as the first studio film shot in a completely noir style. Peter Lorre virtually reprises the eerily convincing persona he created in Fritz Lang's M, adding an emotion-wringing melancholia to his performance as a paranoid, lost soul. Featuring the astounding art direction of Van Nest Polglase and the brilliant cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca, as well as reportedly uncredited script work by Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust)!
A down-on-his-luck ex-GI finds himself framed for an armored car robbery. When he's finally released for lack of evidence--after having been beaten up and tortured by the police--he sets out to discover who set him up, and why. The trail leads him into Mexico and a web of hired killers and corrupt cops.
Based on Jay Dratler's novel The Pitfall, André de Toth's gripping film is a classic L.A. noir in the tradition of Detour, and shows the spiraling, epic consequences resulting from one fateful decision.
Centring on the activities of a gang of assorted criminals and, in particular, their leader â a vicious young hoodlum known as "Pinkie" â the film's main thematic concern is the criminal underbelly evident in inter-war Brighton.
Stark, perverse story of murder, kidnapping, and police corruption in Mexican border town.
Al Roberts, a New York nightclub pianist, hitch-hikes to Hollywood to meet his girlfriend Sue. The gambler he's riding with, Charles, unexpectedly dies. Afraid the police wouldn't believe the truth, Al takes the man's identity. In a gas station, he gives a lift to Vera, a woman that knew Charles and blackmails Al with tragic consequences.
Recently paroled from prison, legendary burglar "Doc" Riedenschneider, with funding from Alonzo Emmerich, a crooked lawyer, gathers a small group of veteran criminals together in the Midwest for a big jewel heist.
This film-noir piece, told in semi-documentary style, follows police on the hunt for a resourceful criminal who shoots and kills a cop.
Bart Tare is an ex-Army man who has a lifelong fixation with guns, he meets a kindred spirit in sharpshooter Annie Starr and goes to work at a carnival. After upsetting the carnival owner who lusts after Starr, they both get fired. Soon, on Starr's behest, they embark on a crime spree for cash. Subjects of a manhunt, they are tracked by police in the hills Tare enjoyed as a boy.
The movie follows the rise and fall of a con man â a story that begins and ends at a seedy travelling carnival. Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) joins the carnival, working with "Mademoiselle Zeena" (Joan Blondell) and her alcoholic husband, Pete (Ian Keith).
Based on the Hemingway novel To Have and Have Not. A fisherman with money problems hires out his boat to transport criminals.
A fatally shot female gangleader recounts her sordid life of crime to a police officer just before she dies.
Belfast police conduct a door-to-door manhunt for an IRA gunman (James Mason) wounded in a daring robbery.
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