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B Noir

Any film connoisseur worth their salt knows that the purveyors of this genre aimed low but shot high.

B Noir
Photo: Film Forum

Your typical B-movie director always had his eyes on the bottom of the barrel (for him, it was the dirty little things that stuck to people’s feet that really counted), but any film connoisseur worth their salt knows that the purveyors of this genre aimed low but shot high. Film Forum’s festival devoted to the “B noir” films of the ’40s and ’50s may be the most important repertory event of the year, and it transmits a very clear message: that the Poverty Row clip joint was a more treacherous and richer place to hang your hat than Casablanca. Of the 70 films playing during the series in the six weeks between May 5 and June 15, more than half are unavailable on video and nearly all will be shown in newly spic-n-spanned 35mm prints, including rarities like Lew Landers’s Man in the Dark (projected in 3D!), Jack Arnold’s The Glass Web and, the rarest of them all, Joseph Losey’s remake of Fritz Lang’s M. Sharing space with already-established classics of the genre like the American godfather of the French New Wave, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing are spunkier productions by Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy, The Big Combo), Phil Karlson (Kansas City Confidential, The Phenix City Story), André de Toth (Crime Wave), and Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour), Nicholas Ray’s existentialist primer On Dangerous Ground, and works by the recently departed Robert Wise (The Set-Up, Born to Kill, The Captive City) and Richard Fleischer (Trapped, Bodygaurd, The Clay Pigeon). We haven’t seen them all, but we hope this preliminary guide will help you tell the fierce hatchetmen from the namby pamby messenger boys. Look for more reviews in the upcoming weeks here and on the site’s blog, and for a full schedule of films and ticket information click here. Ed Gonzalez

Between Midnight and Dawn (Gourdon Douglas, 1950)

Gordon Douglas infuses Between Midnight and Dawn with a hammy comic-book sensibility: the opening line (“The big city is full of people and people are full of crime”) suggests something out of a thought bubble, the incessant why-you-dirty-rat noir-speak sticks to the roof of people’s mouths like peanut butter, and a wise-alecky little boy with freckles all over his face looks to be in training pants for a role as one Dick Tracy’s adversaries. Dan Purvis (Edmond O’Brien) and Rocky Barnes (Mark Stevens) volley for the attention of a young woman who vowed never to date another police officer after the death of her father, but are the guys looking to score a date or a threesome? The film is a comedy with delusions of noir—unessential but good for a laugh given its almost campy scent of obliviousness. Gonzalez

The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955)

Shadows and lies are the stars of The Big Combo, a spellbinding black-and-white chiaroscuro with the segmented texture of a spider’s web. Caught in the center of this sticky, elastic clutter of light and shadow is Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), the girlfriend of a mobster with information about a mysterious woman named Alicia that may be of interest to police lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Wallace’s real life hubby Cornel Wilde). John Alton’s lush camerawork is so dominant here you wouldn’t know Joseph H. Lewis was also behind the camera. The story doesn’t have any of the he-she psychosexual politicking that juices the director’s Gun Crazy, but that’s no loss given this film’s richer returns. The set-pieces are fierce, as is the Casablanca tweak of the last shot, and Wallace’s performance—a sad spectacle of a hurting creature caught between light and dark, good and evil—is one of noir’s great unheralded triumphs. Gonzalez

Born to Kill (Robert Wise, 1947)

The usually meek Robert Wise trades his chameleonic tastefulness for full-on, jazzy misanthropy in this nasty melodrama. The main vipers on display are Lawrence Tierney’s blithely murdering thug and Claire Trevor’s randy socialite, braided together by each other’s lowdown wiles. The action shoots from seedy Reno to moneyed San Francisco, where Tierney marries Trevor’s newspaper heiress sister as a way to stay within screwing distance of his perverse “soul mate,” whose lust scarcely diminishes upon discovery of his throttling, stabbing past. Wise swims in the genre’s amorality, scoring a kitchen brawl to big-band radio tunes, terrorizing a soused matron at a nocturnal beach skirmish, and leaving the last word to Walter Slezak’s jovially corrupt detective. Fernando F. Croce

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The Captive City (Robert Wise, 1952)

Noir wasn’t Robert Wise’s strong suit but he knew how to dress up a flimsy picture. His 1952 film The Captive City stars a young John Forsythe as a newspaper reporter trying to expose a town’s corruption only to meet resistance at every turn. The story stumbles through an allegorical indictment of the House Un-American Committee, culminating with a cheesy direct-to-camera address by Senator Estes Kefauver, but Wise’s images frequently show flashes of wit, if not snap or crackle. The opening chase sequences and establishing shots are lucid cuts of Americana and his nervy manipulation of depth of field conveys an uneasy sense that all eyes are watching Forsythe’s would-be gumshoe and wife (Joan Camden, resembling a neutered Judy Davis). Cutting Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons definitely did Wise a few favors. Gonzalez

Crime of Passion (Gerd Oswald, 1957)

In the first reel of Crime of Passion it’s made clear that the lesbians of San Francisco can’t get enough of tough-talking advice columnist Barbara Stanwyck, whose Sapphic wisdom is extolled by butch lady cabbies. When a 17-year-old writes in to ask what she should do about her love for a married man, Stanwyck quips that she should run away with his wife. Though she sees marriage as “propaganda,” she falls rather quickly in love with cop Sterling Hayden and marries him, mainly because he’s so soft and feminine. Hayden installs Stanwyck into a hellish suburbia where the women only talk about their TV sets; after a particularly trying montage of idle housewife chatter, Stanwyck rages against the mediocrity all around her. When she rails against her kitchen duties, she’s a ’30s star railing potently against ’50s conformity. Though her character turns violent, the reasons behind her anger are powerfully expressed and the film puts you on her side. This overlooked, subversive movie has a strong feminist message and an even stronger Stanwyck performance. Dan Callahan

Crime Wave (André De Toth, 1954)

Something like a god looks down over Los Angeles by night, and though he breathes out so much authority there’s not enough wind left to raise his voice, he’s also betrayed by the pack of toothpicks he smokes every shift. Ink-eyed Sterling Hayden is that god in the form of a seemingly unflappable police detective in André De Toth’s Crime Wave, a relentlessly unforced potboiler that gazes at noir through the looking glass. (Or should that be through the glass ceiling?) Hayden’s crime-fighting battle plan consists largely of targeting casual miscreants, those most likely to be extorted by bigger, burlier criminals. To track a trio of jailbreak hooligans, Hayden puts the squeeze on a newlywed ex-con who, as luck would have it, actually is being blackmailed by the escaped convicts. De Toth showcases the magnitude of Hayden’s pool of potential stoolies in one showstopping traveling shot down a line of interrogation desks, each one a passion play in miniature. Not that Hayden, in his hot pursuit, takes note. If the maxim “crime doesn’t pay” is noir’s given, then Crime Wave spins it to answer “but virtue barely scrapes up a living wage.” Eric Henderson

The Crimson Kimono (Samuel Fuller, 1959)

Manny Farber wrote, “The reason movies are bad lies is this audience’s failure to appreciate, much less fight for, films like the unspectacular, unpolished ‘B,’ worked out by a few people with belief and skill in their art, who capture the unworked-over immediacy of life before it has been cooled by ‘Art.’” Samuel Fuller was one of those people and The Crimson Kimono was one of those films. The opening is a triumph of grungy lyricism achieved through snaky cutting and blunt compositions: Sugar Torch (Gloria Pall), a blond and bodacious piece of stripper meat, is shot to death in the middle of a Los Angeles street after witnessing a murder inside her dressing room. The tenor of the film oscillates between tight-fisted noir and chamber drama, but the theme is always the same: cultural and romantic unrest. Two detectives, Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) and Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta), travel to the Japanese quarter of the city to break the thorny case but fall in love with Christine Downs (Victoria Shaw). Harry Sukman’s score courts condescension whenever the action shifts to Little Tokyo, but it’s the film’s only slip. Fuller’s feat is giving the film’s nonstop interrogations, meetings and confrontations profound racial and political meaning. Gonzalez

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Detour (Edward G. Ulmer, 1944)

Tom Neal’s Al has the sourest puss in all of noir, and his perpetual frown and whiny, unreliable narration give the low-budget Detour its evocative dourness. Shot on the cheap in six days, Edward G. Ulmer’s Poverty Row tale of woe is an archetypal exercise in post-war pessimism, detailing the pathetic downfall of a two-bit piano player (Neal) doomed by his cowardice. With its overcooked dialogue, makeshift sets, jagged performances (including Anne Savage’s crazy-eyed femme fatale) and endless rear-projection car scenes, this coincidence-laden suspense yarn has no business being as irresistibly moody as it is. Like great garage rock, however, Ulmer’s landmark film ultimately derives its raw, jittery vitality from its very crudeness. Nick Schager

D.O.A. (Rudolph Mate, 1950)

D.O.A. kicks off with noir’s most enticing intro, as Edmond O’Brien wends his way through increasingly claustrophobic police station corridors to arrive at a detective’s office, where he reports a murder: his own! Once the film proceeds with its flashbacked tale of how O’Brien unknowingly ingested fatal “luminous” poison (which, as its goofy name implies, glows in the dark), Rudolph Maté’s seminal thriller—aside from a few choice one-liners and a sexualized jazz club sequence—rapidly decomposes into a campy, confusing bore. The overly complicated explanation for O’Brien’s poisoning, however, is no more confounding than the dead man’s tolerance for Pamela Britton’s nagging, needy, marriage-obsessed girlfriend. Schager

Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)

It’s a good thing Joseph H. Lewis, proud member of Andrew Sarris’s clan of “Expressive Esoterica,” had as exciting a visual flair and as much a taste for zero-flab pacing as he did. Otherwise, Gun Crazy, his 1949 “pre-Bonnie and Clyde” would be an hour-and-a-half of two lovers on the lam stroking their own Phallic symbols. The film flirts with misogyny (not that 95% of film noirs weren’t guilty, on the surface, of the same), and unlike any number of Raymond Chandler knock-offs of the era, its dialogue sort of rolls over and dies in the mouths of Dall and Cummings, who frequently sounds like a morose, tanked-up Judy Garland. But it’s easy to see why auteurists like Sarris insist even today (when psychosexual interpretations of gunplay come off as a punchline rather than serious foreplay) in holding up the film as a model of directorial expression. Lewis, through sheer force of will, turns the script’s easy ways out (“I told you I’m a bad girl, didn’t I?”) into the essence of blunt, adolescent sexual flowering. Wild, wam-bam pacing eventually matures into the film’s most memorable sequence: a one-take robbery sequence taken from the back seat of the getaway car, a stunning tour de force that’s Lewis’s cinematographic slow fuck. Henderson

He Walked By Night (Alfred L. Werker and Anthony Mann, 1947)

The credits indicate Alfred L. Werker only, but this thriller is of a piece with the noir circle of T-Men and Raw Deal, courtesy of an uncredited Anthony Mann. The plot is a clipped LAPD tribute with roots in an actual 1947 case, with police officers Scott Brady and Roy Roberts latching onto killer Richard Basehart’s slippery trail of crumbs. Investigation procedures are methodically viewed, laying the ground for the rigorous urban Bressonism of Dragnet, though the film’s documentary terseness is consistently goosed by John Alton’s masterly lighting, with the climax at the sewer system staged with enough fierce subterranean geometry to make Lang proud. Croce

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House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955)

House of Bamboo has some of the most stunning examples of widescreen photography in the history of cinema. Traveling to Japan on 20th Century Fox’s dime, Fuller captured a country divided, trapped between past traditions and progressive attitudes while lingering in the devastating aftereffects of an all-too-recent World War. His visual schema represents the societal fractures through a series of deep-focus, Noh-theatrical tableaus, a succession of silhouettes, screens and stylized color photography that melds the heady insanity of a Douglas Sirk melodrama—see, as an especial point of comparison, Sirk’s 1956 Korea-set war film Battle Hymn—with the philosophical inquiry of the best noirs. Keith Uhlich

Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952)

Phil Karlson’s rote heist-revenge flick aims to be stone cold, but can’t seem to get any frost to grow around its warm, mushy heart. You’d probably think, at first, that the steady barrage of extreme close-ups is meant to provide redundant tactility to the mugs of dagger-cheekboned Lee Van Cleef and Jack “Boggy” Elam as sweat sticks to their faces like so much sausage perspiration. But as the boys engage in round after round of slap-slap-lickety-lap (there are more open-handed strikes per square inch of face here than in all of Mommie Dearest), the close-ups take on a far more melodramatic, Falconettish resonance. Beyond the hoods’ domestic abuse, there are no femmes fatale in sight; the only female in the picture is studying for the Bar. And the protagonist, played by John Payne, saved Santa Claus, ferchrissake! Surely he’ll have no problem reforming a cop who’s lost his faith in the scales of justice. Either that or he’ll slap him back to last week. Henderson

The Killer Is Loose (Budd Boetticher, 1956)

Like Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher cut his teeth in noir thrillers before carving a distinctive niche in Westerns, yet where Mann is tautly neurotic, Boetticher is perversely serene. Handed a narrative stuffed with cat-and-mouse violence, the filmmaker plays down dark hysteria in favor of grayish curtness, and the film is no less tense for that. The killer is Wendell Corey’s bespectacled bank robber, on the loose and on a mission: to murder the wife of police officer Joseph Cotten, whom Corey blames for the death of his own wife. The picture has the unique flow of a laconic nightmare, with the mingled sympathies of the antagonists anticipating Boetticher’s complex later works. Croce

The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956)

Stanley Kubrick’s masterful manipulation of chronology brings an excruciating sense of doom to The Killing, a classical noir about a carefully threaded heist unraveled by the scheming of a fiendish femme. Having already emasculated her lapdog husband, Marie Windsor’s psychosexual dominatrix gets covetous upon catching wind of granite-faced Sterling Hayden’s race-track robbery plot, which requires an eclectic assortment of Asphalt Jungle-ish participants (insane rifleman, wimpy clerk, crooked cop, kind bartender, chess-playing wrestler) and which is orchestrated—save for Windsor’s anomalously hot-blooded scenes—with the icy auteur’s trademark precision and attention to detail. Proficiently splicing and reshuffling the action until it seems that only fate (or the ever-godlike director) is fully in control of Hayden and his crew’s destinies, Kubrick generates portentous suspense via discordant staging and methodical camera calisthenics until, faced with inescapable failure, Hayden’s thug can barely muster the energy to utter, “Eh, what’s the difference.” Schager

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Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

Never was Mike Hammer’s name more fitting than in Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s blisteringly nihilistic noir in which star Ralph Meeker embodies Mickey Spillane’s legendary P.I. with brute force savagery. Sneering, scowling and dishing out ruthless justice almost as often as he takes cruel thrashings, Meeker’s Hammer is a heartless, narcissistic, amoral beast with nothing but contempt for society, a worldview that Aldrich also assumes in every one of his bluntly beautiful staircase-punctuated compositions and stinging close-ups. A “bedroom dick” who willingly admits to his own sordidness (“All right, you’ve got me convinced. I’m a real stinker,” he tells some pesky cops), Hammer embroils himself in radioactive mystery after he almost runs down a hitchhiking psychiatric ward escapee (Cloris Leachman), gives her a lift, and then, after the woman is killed by her pursuers, is nearly exterminated for his trouble. The gumshoe’s subsequent investigation into the woman’s death doubles as a lacerating indictment of modern society’s dissolution into physical/moral/spiritual degeneracy—a reversion that ultimately leads to nuclear apocalypse and man’s return to the primordial sea—with the director’s knuckle-sandwich cynicism pummeling the genre’s romantic fatalism into a bloody pulp. “Remember me”? Aldrich’s sadistic, fatalistic masterpiece is impossible to forget. Schager

Murder By Contract (Irving Lerner, 1958)

Limpid, compact low-budget ingenuity. Emotionless hepcat Vince Edwards insinuates himself as a contract killer for an unseen Mr. Big and, after proving his efficiency with a couple of clean rubouts, gets handed a major assignment—offing a mob witness holed up behind a wall of feds. Closer to Paul Schrader’s narcissistic loners than to Jean-Pierre Melville’s spiritual sangfroid, Edward’s chilly sheen is stuffed with pocketbook fatalism, but the film’s cunning oddness levels its pretensions. Irving Lerner’s camera records Edwards’s moral emptiness with a sharpshooter’s calm, the better to place his blankness against the jitters of Herschel Bernardi and Phillip Pine, the Mutt n’ Jeff hoods chaperoning him. Croce

The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)

Postwar cinema was plenty country, and more than enough rock ‘n’ roll. But whether we’re talking The Egg and I or High School Confidential, the drive-in era’s depiction of the effects of urban hangover upon idyllic small town Americana invariably revealed a wounded-but-upright oasis of morality, if only because you couldn’t expect the Big City’s fashionable crime to trickle down for at least a decade. Speaking of being ahead of the curve, noir films stood out among their dated contemporaries like pure hip-hop. And Samuel Fuller’s fizzy, wigged-out masterpiece The Naked Kiss drops it from frame one, with Constance Towers purse-smacking a P.O.V. shot, brandishing a seltzer bottle and upbraiding her pimp, essentially demanding “What, you slipped? Fell? Landed on her dick?” Fuller’s fierce prologue is only an appetizer for the depths he sinks to when his reformed ho tries to hoist up her stockings and reach for anonymity in the rural wild. The Naked Kiss grows positively feral as Towers uncovers the town’s perverse, thriving criminal underbelly and comes to the conclusion that even being a two-bit, big-city tramp is more noble than living anywhere that has a Main Street. It’s Sirk-on-a-shoestring, and twice as cynical. Henderson

The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952)

As lean and muscular as its portly train passenger is obese (“Nobody loves a fat man except his grocer and tailor”), Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin delivers crisp crime drama interested in challenging identity assumptions. Charles McGraw’s detective escorts Marie Windsor’s mobster’s wife to L.A. via locomotive so she can testify. Evading on-board killers and coping with sunshiny Jacqueline White and her pesky kid, however, is nothing compared to the cop’s confounding attempts to decipher who’s who. Poised shifts in focus, disorienting cuts and animated lighting bestow the surprise-filled story with concussive vigor; Windsor’s pitiless broad gives it its dark sensuality. Schager

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On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

Perched between late-’40s noir and mid-’50s crime drama, this is one of the great, forgotten works of the genre. Robert Ryan is a time-bomb of a New York cop, tormented by the urban squalor he sees around him; after roughing up one too many crooks, he’s assigned to track down a killer in wintry upstate, where he falls for Ida Lupino, the main suspect’s blind sister. Easily mushy, the material achieves a nearly transcendental beauty in the hands of Ray, a poet of anguished expression: The urban harshness of the city is contrasted with the austere snowy countryside for some of the most disconcertingly moving effects in all film noir. Despite the violence and the steady intensity, a remarkably pure film. Croce

The Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)

In Robert Siodmak’s 1944 noir, Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone) is framed for his estranged wife’s murder and it’s up to his secretary, Kansas (Ella Raines), to clear his name by securing his alibi from an elusive, hat-wearing woman. The film has very little meat on its bones (the story’s eerie obsession with hands and statues doesn’t really add up to anything), but it strikes some gorgeous visual poses. Rains stalks a barkeep with such intensity she suggests a wild thing let out of one of Val Lewton’s cages, and Siodmak’s success is a creepy little number in which the actress seduces a ratty drummer for information: Channeling the spirit of the Russians (Eisenstein, Dovshenko, Vertov), the director uses grotesque angles, close-ups and rhythms to suggest a powerful sense of seduction and torture. Gonzalez

The Phenix City Story (Phil Karlson, 1955)

A modern Pompeii (or Southern-fried Sodom and Gomorrah—take your pick), Phenix City, Alabama is a den of iniquity ruled by gangsters who murder enemies with impunity, whether they be women, children or a noble lawyer (John McIntire) and his former G.I. son (Richard Kiley). Based on real events, Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story opens with journalistic interviews of actual locals, a misleading intro given the hysterical fictionalization that ensues, punctuated by swaggering camerawork, performances both inflated (from the professional cast) and stilted (from townsfolk amateurs), and a finale in which malevolent mob terror is countered not by vigilantism—as in Karlson’s unofficial remake Walking Tall—but by military martial law. Its borderline-obscene wallop, however, is derived from its brusque brutality, as in a startlingly cavalier depiction of a murdered African-American girl being unceremoniously tossed from a speeding car. Schager

Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948)

Blessed with DP John Alton’s Wellesian deep focus, chiaroscuro illumination, and images fraught with foreground/background tension, Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal is the apex of noir style, offering up electric visions of sin, salvation and sexual mania. The aching urgency and fervor of Alton’s breathtaking work is regularly counterbalanced by star Dennis O’Keefe’s lumbering blankness, but typically wooden acting (for a Mann crime pic) can’t alter the fact that this story of a hood who busts out of prison seeking romance and revenge with a pair of dames (one his obsessed girlfriend, the other his semi-willing hostage) is the director’s bleakest and most neurotic. A messy jumble of carnal desires, naïve dreams and soul-crushing pessimism, the film derives its lusty perversity from Claire Trevor’s narrating moll, and its viciousness from Raymond Burr’s flaming desert-hurling mobster. Schager

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Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949)

Noir visits the French Revolution, as the emphasis on vicious brutality suggests an account written by the Marquis de Sade. The setting is France during the turbulent 1790s, where Robespierre (Richard Basehart) spreads dictatorial horror and dissenting voices are succinctly guillotined; Robert Cummings, an operative for the newly-formed Republic, infiltrates the tyrant’s circle. The studio may have asked Anthony Mann for A Tale of Two Cities reworked as a tasteful quickie, but what it got was a wicked, visually astonishing entry in the director’s ferocious crime thrillers. Beneath the powdered wigs of period reconstruction lurks not only Mann’s violence (Basehart’s demise is a stunner), but also a glimpse of the political anxieties of the ’40s and beyond. Croce

The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949)

Robert Ryan’s washed-up palooka clings to the belief that one punch will land him back on the fast track to respectability, not realizing (thanks to his greedy manager) that the fix is in. Robert Wise’s The Set-Up isn’t noir by any serious definition, its boilerplate fatalism undone by overbearing moralizing and the fact that Ryan’s boxer is too one-dimensionally good to register as tragic. There’s a dynamism to Wise’s rough, real-time in-ring action (an influence on Raging Bull). But the same can’t be said about Ryan’s wife’s (Audrey Totter) nighttime stroll through the city—littered with eye-rollingly obvious symbols of an alternate, “normal” life—or the stereotype-upending ringside spectators, highlighted by a hilariously bloodthirsty blind man. Schager

Side Street (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Cineastes have embraced Anthony Mann’s great westerns but his equally exceptional noirs still await discovery. Like Reign of Terror and The Tall Target, the heady Side Street is a triumph of visual savvy and moral exactitude—a scurrying spectacle of dog-cat-and-mouse throughout the veiny streets of New York City. The Big Apple comes alive via a nervy mix of photojournalistic shots of people on the move and hieratic compositions that give the squeeze to Farley Granger’s Joe Norton, a poor mail carrier who steals $30,000 somewhat accidentally, loses it, and spends the duration of the film trying to retrieve it while avoiding murder charges. The film’s title is a reference to its entwined physical and moral frameworks: Through the venomous-winding city streets of the city plays out a clammy morality tale about a man living on the fringes of society who succumbs easily and understandably to weakness only to struggle with great difficulty to atone for his indiscretion. In a city so big, will anyone care? Gonzalez

The Tall Target (Anthony Mann, 1951)

As in Reign of Terror, Anthony Mann fashions a noir mini-masterpiece out of incongruous period reconstruction. The hook is the Baltimore Plot, a conspiracy which in 1861 attempted to kill Abraham Lincoln (the “tall target”) during the inaugurating train ride of the Ohio & Baltimore Railway. Dick Powell, flashing the tough-guy persona from Murder, My Sweet like a badge, protects Abe from the assassins hidden in the shadows, making creative, gruesome use of locomotive steam in the progress. The train’s cramped spaces offer Mann a challenge, and the director rises to it via sinewy camera movement, elegantly modulated rhythms and arresting paranoia, not to mention the blueprint for the following year’s The Narrow Margin. Croce

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They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949)

Celebrated by the Cahiers du Cinéma clique for its formal inventiveness and melodramatic grandeur, Nicholas Ray’s first feature They Live By Night remains essential predominantly because of the former, its ominous aerial shots, evocative framing and meticulous acoustic design all contributing to an atmosphere of tormented romanticism. Its socially conscious lovers-on-the-lam tale (from Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us), alas, has grown somewhat creaky, whether it be Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell’s virginal smitten kittens confessing their inexperience at kissing (tee hee!) or O’Donnell’s belief that a good woman “is sort of like a dog” (loyal to the end!). Fortunately, in scenes such as Howard Da Silva shattering the naïve couple’s Christmas tree ornaments—and, in the process, their quixotic dream of ever escaping the criminal life—Ray’s plaintive artistry lends this weepy noir a melancholic beauty. Schager

Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

A bleak portrait of post-WWII despair, corrupt capitalism and idealistic disillusionment, Jules Dassin’s melodrama about long-haul truckers was the director’s final, and finest, film made in America before the HUAC exiled him to Europe. Richard Conte’s trucker returns home from the war and, discovering that Lee J. Cobb’s produce market kingpin has ruined his father, sets out for revenge. Its Darryl Zanuck-mandated ending may be insincerely upbeat, but the close-ups of speedometers and spinning tires create a propulsive sense of the inevitable doom that follows Conte’s desperate, road-raging nomad—transformed from an enthusiastically optimistic ex-soldier into a battle-scarred itinerant—as he hurtles through the night in his rickety rig. Schager

Thunder Road (Arthur Ripley, 1958)

Southern drive-in staple Thunder Road is basically The Robert Mitchum Show; not only does the sleepy-eyed tough guy headline this romanticized portrait of a Tennessee moonshine transporter, but he also produced it, penned its script and theme song, and had his son cast in a supporting role (as his kid brother!). The ubiquitously involved star’s charisma can’t completely overshadow a sluggish plot, in which Mitchum’s sexually magnetic whisky hauler makes the ladies swoon and his male cohorts jealous while evading the law, battling a crooked businessman and preventing his sibling from entering the liquor racquet. Nonetheless, its hard-charging chase sequences make it a vintage Dukes of Hazzard-flavored noir. Schager

T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947)

Subtext is king in Anthony Mann’s noirs, with engrossing, underlying social, political and psychological traumas compensating for caricatural dialogue, monotonous performances and plodding plot twists. In T-Men, treasury agents Dennis O’Keefe and Alfred Ryder go undercover to crack a counterfeit ring, only to confirm both the slender gulf between lawmen and louts and—in the film’s spousal rejection pièce de résistance—cops’ simultaneously noble, destructive and pathetic devotion to duty. Awkward omniscient narration is merely one way Mann strives for an aesthetic of semi-documentary verisimilitude. However, in myriad shots defined by lacerating diagonals and ground-up angles, genre legend John Alton uses heavenly light and hellish shadow to firmly confine the paranoid action within anxiously expressionistic parameters. Schager

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Witness to Murder (Roy Rowland, 1954)

This threadbare little thriller looks like it was written and shot over a weekend, and it would be entirely forgettable if not for two things: John Alton’s moody cinematography and the jaw-dropping moment when murderous ex-Nazi George Sanders, whose books are described as “a hash of Nietzsche and Hegel,” starts shouting in Hitler-style German at a terrified Barbara Stanwyck. It’s the only laugh in the movie, but it’s quite a howler, especially because Alton highlights Sanders’s face with a satirically “wicked” glow. Callahan

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