250 Quintessential Film Noirs

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There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” as the narrator immortally states at the close of this classic film by Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin—and this is one of them. A model is found dead in the bathtub of her apartment, apparently after committing suicide. However, the coroner realizes that she was actually murdered with a simulation of suicide, and the experienced Homicide Lieutenant Detective Dan Muldoon initiates his investigations with Detective Jimmy Halloran and his team.Read More »

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The luminous Gene Tierney, who starred in director Preminger’s breakout film LAURA, appears here as Ann Sutton, the kleptomaniac wife of a distant but loving psychoanalyst, (Richard Conte). When she is caught shoplifting, suave hypnotist David Korvo (José Ferrer) comes to her aid, but soon Ann finds herself enmeshed in far more dangerous crimes. Implicated in a plot that involves blackmail and murder, Ann is uncertain of her own innocence, but her husband is convinced that the hypnotist is behind the crimes. Loosely adapted from Guy Endore’s novel METHINKS THE LADY…, the script was penned by noted screenwriter Ben Hecht under a pseudonym during the Red Scare. Preminger, who was one of Hollywood’s top directors of the 1950s, combines characteristics of the noir film with the melodrama. He creates an incisive look at the very human flaws of its wealthy characters, as well as the manipulative charlatan who preys upon them; at the center of the story is the trouble afflicting an apparently happy upper-class marriage.
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The Damned Don’t Cry – It’s a man’s world. And Ethel Whitehead learns there’s only one way for a woman to survive in it: be as tempting as a cupcake and as tough as a 75-cent steak. In the first of three collaborations with director Vincent Sherman, Joan Crawford brings hard-boiled glamour and simmering passion to the role of Ethel, who moves from the wrong side of the tracks to a mobster’s mansion to high society one man at a time. Some of those men love her. Some use her. And one a high-rolling racketeer abuses her. When the racketeer murders his rival in Ethel’s swanky living room, she flees a sure murder rap right back to the poverty she thought she had escaped. And this time there may not be a man to pick up the pieces of her shattered life.Read More »