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“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.” – Aristotle The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Nearly a decade after defense attorney Sam Bowden ( Gregory Peck ) acts as Good Samaritan by intervening in an attempted rape, perpetrator Max Cady ( Robert Mitchum ) tracks him to Savannah, Georgia and begins to deal out long-awaited retribution on Bowden’s family. As Cady carefully navigates the ever-thinning line between licit and... Read Full Story

Small Town Murder Songs is an expertly crafted Canadian noir written/produced/directed & edited by Ed Gass-Donnelly. In the 50's it might've been a Western, and if American could've been set in Pennsylvania or perhaps Kentucky. But it's out in a rural Canadian province that a naked woman is found strangled. Though this film is no murder mystery more a redemptive noir character study of Walt ( Peter Stormare ) the local police chief. It opens with a memory of the disgust and disappointment... Read Full Story

Film noir and The Twilight Zone have more in common than you'd probably think. B-movie actors from the 40s peppered the casts of Twilight Zone episodes almost 20 years later. Dutch angles magnify tension; and other impressive black and white photography (at least before the Twilight Zone started to shoot on video late in the series) on the CBS show could easily be mistaken for a classic noir. Watch the credits at the end of a TZ and you'll see many names sometimes associated with film noir... Read Full Story

In 1949, RKO Pictures was in financial trouble (but then again, when wasn’t it?). Howard Hughes was in the process of ruining the studio, due in large part to his poor decision-making when it came to which pictures to greenlight and his constant meddling with films as they were being made. In 1948, the year before Follow Me Quietly was released, RKO had seen its profits drop by a staggering 90 percent, from $5.1 million in 1947 to a mere $500,000 in 1948. Moving forward, the company would... Read Full Story

The Small Back Room (1949) was the first film made between Alexander Korda’s London Films and The Archers --the name given to the partnership between filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger . The Archers, whose official working collaboration lasted for approximately 15 years, and whose personal relationship lasted until Pressburger’s death in 1988, had worked separately for Korda in the past and had just been dropped by the Rank Organisation . Rank precipitously dumped The Archers as... Read Full Story

“You’re a very paradoxical young man.” Shops closing early! There’s a killer thief on the loose in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, and the cops are hot on his trail. That’s a bare bones plot description if ever there was one, yet it jibes well with Chinatown at Midnight — a rabbit punch of a movie that cashes in on the success of He Walked by Night , the granddaddy of film noir cop procedurals, released to theaters just a year before. It’s a fast paced little movie with just a few... Read Full Story

It's the battle of the strutting, preening alpha males! Fighting out of the blue corner, with the prison pallor, the brand new cheap suit, and the "not good, not bad" room at the Avon, it's Frankie Madison ( Burt Lancaster ), former world heavyweight champion of bootlegging. Fighting out of the red corner, with the jutting cleft chin, the expensive wardrobe, and the controlling interest in the swank night spot the Regent Club, it's Noll "Dink" Turner ( Kirk Douglas ), the current... Read Full Story

Dark City (1950) is commonly listed by film experts as an important film in the noir canon. I have a feeling it may be because of the title. Dark City (directed by William Dieterle), The Dark Corner , The Dark Mirror , Dark Passage and Dark Waters all are consider noir and share a similar monikers. They all certainly have the right “look.” But only The Dark Corner and Dark Passage are shady and dim enough while the rest are just handsome melodramas. After rewatching Dark City again... Read Full Story

Preliminary disclosure: I’m a huge Fritz Lang fan. In my early twenties, when I first started to discover the world of film outside of contemporary Hollywood productions, Lang’s earlier films were some of the touchstones by which I quickly started to measure the quality of all other films. M (1931) remains a favorite; Lang's expressionistic cinematography, dark subject matter and perfect pacing foreshadowed the subject matter and stylistic touches of countless film noir projects from... Read Full Story

“He who sows the storm, reaps the whirlwind.” In 1942, Mrs. Miniver , the winner of six academy awards was the biggest box office draw in Britain while the gothic noir Hatter’s Castle , from director Lance Comfort and the Paramount British production company was the box office runner-up. Could two films be more dissimilar? The overly sentimental Mrs. Miniver , a film used for WWII propaganda, extolled the virtues of the family and the strengths of women while Hatter’s Castle takes a dark... Read Full Story