This introduction with noir experts Eddie Muller and Imogen Sara Smith was recorded in 2024.

Directed by Billy Wilder • 1950 • United States
Starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim

Hollywood’s ultimate poison-pen letter to itself, Billy Wilder’s acerbic masterpiece casts real-life silent-screen icon Gloria Swanson as a faded movie star who draws a struggling screenwr...

Directed by Joseph H. Lewis • 1950 • United States
Starring Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Berry Kroeger

Bart Tare (John Dall) has been enamored with firearms since he was a kid. Annie Laurie Star (Peggy Cummins) is the sharp-shooting queen of a traveling carnival. When Bart beats Laurie in a sexuall...

Directed by Nicholas Ray • 1950 • United States
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame

When a gifted but washed-up screenwriter with a hair-trigger temper—Humphrey Bogart, in a revelatory, vulnerable performance—becomes the prime suspect in a brutal Tinseltown murder, the only person who ca...

Directed by John Huston • 1950 • United States
Starring Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen

In a smog-choked city somewhere in the American Midwest, an aging criminal mastermind, newly released from prison, hatches a plan for a million-dollar jewel heist and draws a wealthy lawyer and a c...

Directed by Jules Dassin • 1950 • United States
Starring Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers

Two-bit hustler Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) longs for “a life of ease and plenty.” Trailed by an inglorious history of go-nowhere schemes, he tries to hatch a lucrative plan with a famous wr...

Directed by John Cromwell • 1950 • United States
Starring Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead, Ellen Corby

When nineteen-year-old Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) arrives at a women’s prison already pregnant, she finds herself at the center of a war for her soul waged between a reform-minded warden (Agn...

Directed by Nicholas Ray • 1950 • United States
Starring Joan Fontaine, Robert Ryan, Zachary Scott

Joan Fontaine makes for a memorably ruthless femme fatale in this deliciously dishy noir melodrama from genre master Nicholas Ray. She plays Christabel Caine, the outwardly sweet, beautiful, and do...

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock • 1950 • United Kingdom
Starring Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most overlooked thrillers finds him teaming up with an all-star cast—including the ever-glamorous Marlene Dietrich—for a twisty tale of murder in the London theat...

Directed by Cy Endfield • 1950 • United States
Starring Frank Lovejoy, Kathleen Ryan, Richard Carlson

Inspired by the highly publicized 1933 murder of department store heir Brooke Hart (also the basis for Fritz Lang’s FURY), this noir from blacklisted director Cy Endfield follows desperate, unem...

Directed by Robert Siodmak • 1950 • United States
Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, Paul Kelly

Having established herself as the screen’s ultimate femme fatale in DOUBLE INDEMNITY, Barbara Stanwyck once again went bad—as only she could—in this brooding noir, directed with a surfeit of sh...

Directed by Hugo Fregonese • 1950 • United States
Starring James Mason, Märta Torén, Dan Duryea

This unconventional blend of gritty noir and dreamy romance stars James Mason as Frank Matson, a gangland doctor who, in a daring double cross, steals not only his mobster boss’s loot, but his moll La...

Directed by Michael Curtiz • 1950 • United States
Starring John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter

Michael Curtiz brings a master skipper’s hand to the helm of this thriller, Hollywood’s second crack at Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not.” John Garfield stars as Harry Morgan, an hone...

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz • 1950 • United States
Starring Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier was launched to stardom with his powerful performance in this intense, unflinching exploration of racial hatred from writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. When a white p...

Directed by Otto Preminger • 1950 • United States
Starring Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill

Ben Hecht’s hard-bitten dialogue, Otto Preminger’s morally ambiguous direction, and one of Dana Andrews’s finest performances come together in this dark, brooding procedural. New York City cop Mar...

Directed by Vincent Sherman • 1950 • United States
Starring Joan Crawford, David Brian, Steve Cochran

In the first of her three collaborations with director Vincent Sherman, Joan Crawford brings commanding presence and hard-boiled glamour to her portrayal of a woman who uses and abandons men to ...

Directed by Elia Kazan • 1950 • United States
Starring Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes

One night in the New Orleans slums, vicious hoodlum Blackie (Jack Palance, in his film debut) and his friends kill an undocumented immigrant who won too much in a card game. When Dr. Clint Re...

Directed by George Sherman • 1950 • United States
Starring Richard Conte, Coleen Gray, Richard Taber

Real-life location shooting at New York’s Bellevue Hospital distinguishes this uniquely disturbing noir. After a young doctor is shot in the head and police fail to uncover a motive, Fred Rowan (...