Film Noir - Films

FILM NOIR

Hitchcock's Menaced Women:

Many of Hitchcock's earlier black-and-white works featured menaced women:

Rebecca (1940) - a naive, unnamed newlywed (Joan Fontaine) was victimized by the housekeeper (Judith Anderson) of her widower husband's ex-wife

Suspicion (1941) - a wealthy wife (Joan Fontaine again) was suspicious of her fortune-hunting husband (Cary Grant) after the murder of a friend (Nigel Bruce)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Joseph Cotten starred as a rich widow-killer who threatened his suspicious favorite niece (Teresa Wright)

Spellbound (1945) - Gregory Peck appeared as a disturbed, amnesia imposter who was accused of murder and counseled by psychiatrist Ingrid Bergman

Notorious (1946) - Ingrid Bergman became the slowly-poisoned wife of a Nazi spy (Claude Rains)

Imperiled Children Noirs:

in Ted Tetzlaff's The Window (1949), a prone-to-lying slum boy (Bobby Driscoll) wasn't believed when he vowed that he had witnessed a New York murder in an adjoining apartment - and his life was threatened by the killers

in the masterwork The Night of the Hunter (1955), the only film ever directed by actor Charles Laughton, Robert Mitchum starred as a psycho-crazed, creepy preacher (with fingers tattooed reading LOVE and HATE) desperately stalking two children to learn their monetary secret

Corruption and Crime Noirs:

Crime and corruption were the main focus of noir films, often with tough police detectives in pursuit:

in Charles Brabin's gritty pre-noir The Beast of the City (1932), gangsters were pursued by a serious police chief (Walter Huston)

in director Archie Mayo's The Petrified Forest (1936), Humphrey Bogart (in an early role) took Bette Davis and Leslie Howard hostage in a desert restaurant/service station

in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), Bogart starred as an aging gangster who couldn't give up his life of crime

in The Glass Key (1942), Alan Ladd saved a politician (Brian Donlevy) from a murder rap

in Fritz Lang's suspenseful wartime espionage thriller Ministry of Fear (1944), based on Graham Greene's novel, Stephen Neale (Ray Milland), in possession of microfilm, found himself on the run from both the Nazis and the authorities

in Robert Siodmak's (and cinematographer Woody Bredell's) expressionistic noir thriller Phantom Lady (1946), based upon Cornell Woolrich's (pseudonym William Irish) pulp novel, an engineer (Alan Curtis) accused of murdering his wife (and sentenced to the electric chair) has an unbelievable alibi (involving a mysterious 'lady' with an ornate hat), so a police inspector must race against time to prove his innocence

in Irving Reis' Crack-Up (1946), a middle-aged art critic and forgery expert (Pat O'Brien) who blacks out must retrace his recent past to circumvent an art forgery conspiracy at a New York museum

in director Joseph H. Lewis' cult film noir So Dark the Night (1946), a French investigating cop must solve murders committed while on vacation

director Roy William Neill's (known for a series of 1940s 'Sherlock Holmes' films) murder mystery Black Angel (1946), based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich, was about an alcoholic piano player (Dan Duryea cast against type) who attempted to solve the murder of his estranged wife in Los Angeles when suspected of being the culprit; with a supporting cast of Broderick Crawford and Peter Lorre

director Robert Wise's nasty noir Born to Kill (1947), based on James Gunn's novel Deadlier Than the Male, starred Lawrence Tierney as a mean, cold-blooded double-murderer ("the coldest killer a woman ever loved"), and Claire Trevor as his bad-girl mistress

in Henry Hathaway's violent crime noir Kiss of Death (1947), Victor Mature starred as paroled robber Nick Bianco opposite chilling, sadistic gangster Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark in his stunning screen debut, noted for the scene in which he giggles hysterically while pushing a wheelchair-bound old woman down a flight of stairs); [remade as the western The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958), and Kiss of Death (1995) with Nicolas Cage]

Robert Siodmak's fatalistic Cry of the City (1948) and the doom-laden Criss Cross (1949) both featured unreliable characters, tenuous relationships and twisting plots, with Yvonne DeCarlo in the latter film as a femme fatale enticing a love-sick Burt Lancaster during a heist gone wrong; [the film was remade by Steven Soderbergh as The Underneath (1995)]

director John Farrow's suspenseful and complex thriller The Big Clock (1948), with a giant corporate clock as the film's centerpiece, told the flashback story of a media executive and Crimeways Magazine journalist George Stroud (Ray Milland) in a race against time to solve the murder of his boss Earl Janoth's (Charles Laughton) mistress Pauline York (Rita Johnson) in 1940s New York - in an investigation that quickly showed himself as the framed prime suspect; [the film was remade as No Way Out (1987) with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman]

in director Robert Rossen's Best Picture-winning All the King's Men (1949), Broderick Crawford portrayed a power-corrupted politician based upon Louisiana's Huey Long

director Robert Wise's last film for RKO, The Set-Up (1949) told of an aging boxer (Robert Ryan) betrayed by his trainers

in black-listed director Jules Dassin's grim Night and the City (1950), Richard Widmark provided the lead performance as an ambitious, scheming, and self-deceiving London hustler

in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), a group of criminals (including Sterling Hayden as Dix Handley) gathered to execute one last, ill-fated jewel heist caper for criminal mastermind Doc (Sam Jaffe) and crooked financial backer (Louis Calhern appearing with his mistress Marilyn Monroe); the unsuccessful jewel robbery unraveled - with the film's final great scene of Dix' death in a Kentucky horse pasture; [remade three times as the western The Badlanders (1958) with Alan Ladd, a jewel heist flick titled Cairo (1963), and Cool Breeze (1972) with an all-black cast]

in Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1951), embittered cop Robert Ryan - investigating a murder of a young girl outside the city - fell for the blind sister (Ida Lupino) of the prime murder suspect, her mentally-ill brother

in Fritz Lang's savage The Big Heat (1953), bereaving, unrestrained cop Glenn Ford was on a one-man crusade against corruption, led by a

in writer/director Samuel Fuller's action-packed, raw thriller-noir Pickup on South Street (1953), Richard Widmark starred as tough-minded ex-con pickpocket Skip McCoy embroiled in the plot with femme fatale prostitute Candy (Jean Peters) after unknowingly stealing microfilm (bound for Communist spies) from her purse during a crowded subway ride

in Andre de Toth's B-film crime noir Crime Wave (1954), Sterling Hayden starred as a confrontational, hard-nosed detective who despised a paroled San Quentin convict struggling to redeem himself

Robert Aldrich's apocalyptic, jarring and violent Kiss Me Deadly (1955) was an adaptation of Mickey Spillane's novel of the same name; it told the quest tale of hardened and violent detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) and sexy assistant Velda (Maxine Cooper) to learn about the deadly contents of the "Great Whatsit" box; [later films repeated the motif of the mysterious box, such as Repo Man (1984) and Pulp Fiction (1994)]

in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956), Sterling Hayden starred as a criminal involved in a doomed-to-fail horse racetrack robbery, and Marie Windsor portrayed the femme fatale

Alfred Hitchcock's noirish thriller The Wrong Man (1956), based on a true story, found Henry Fonda wrongly accused of a crime that he didn't commit

in Alexander MacKendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (1957) from a script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, Burt Lancaster starred as a ruthless, all-powerful and evil NYC gossip columnist (based on Walter Winchell) in league with his sleazy press agent (Tony Curtis) - both engaged in a nasty smear campaign to prevent the columnist's sister's marriage to a musician

in one of the last true classic film noirs, Abraham Polonsky's crime drama Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), a trio of bank-robbers (including Harry Belafonte) faced tensions (of racism and prejudice) within their gang

in J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962), Robert Mitchum - in a memorable villainous role - starred as a sadistic, sordid ex-con named Max Cady exacting revenge on the family-man lawyer (Gregory Peck) that sent him to prison; [remade by Martin Scorsese as Cape Fear (1991) with Robert DeNiro]

Cross-Over Noirs:
The term film noir has also been more widely applied to other categories of films. Some of the most interesting film noir derivatives were the film noir westerns of the 1950s:

Pursued (1947)

The Gunfighter (1950)

High Noon (1952)

The Halliday Brand (1957)

Non-genre dramatic films, such as The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948) could also be considered cross-over dramatic noirs. There are at least two women's film noirs: Mildred Pierce (1945) and Robert Siodmak's The File on Thelma Jordan (1950) with Barbara Stanwyck, and surprisingly a noir musical, Michael Curtiz' Young Man with a Horn (1950).

Created in 1996-2008 © by Tim Dirks. All rights reserved.