Directed by Fritz Lang • 1943 • United States
Starring Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee

The combination of Bertolt Brecht’s eloquent script (the legendary playwright’s only Hollywood credit), director Fritz Lang’s potent moral themes, and noirish cinematography by the great James Wong How...

Directed by André De Toth • 1944 • United States
Starring Alexander Knox, Marsha Hunt, Henry Travers

The first Hollywood film to confront the atrocities of the Holocaust, this chilling exploration of the psychology of fascism was made during World War II, but actually anticipates the Nuremberg t...

Directed by Jules Dassin • 1947 • United States
Starring Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford

As hard-hitting as its title, BRUTE FORCE was the first of Jules Dassin’s forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama that takes a critical look at American society as well. Burt Lancaster ...

Directed by Edward Dmytryk • 1947 • United States
Starring Robert Young, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan

This gritty film noir made history as the first Hollywood film to confront antisemitism. Three of the era’s most celebrated Roberts—Young, Mitchum, and Ryan—star in the hard-hitting tale of a pol...

Directed by Clarence Brown • 1949 • United States
Starring David Brian, Juano Hernández, Claude Jarman Jr.

One of the first major Hollywood films to deal seriously and sensitively with the subject of racial injustice, this landmark adaptation of the novel by William Faulkner features a towering ...

Directed by Edward Dmytryk • 1949 • United Kingdom
Starring Robert Newton, Sally Gray, Naunton Wayne

The first film director Edward Dmytryk made in England after being blacklisted from Hollywood is a wittily inventive blend of black comedy and suspense in which the investigation by a Scotland Ya...

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 Joseph Losey • 1950 • United States
Starring Macdonald Carey, Gail Russell, Johnny Sands

The second of five films leftist director Joseph Losey made in Hollywood before being blacklisted, this socially conscious noir traces simmering racial tensions between white farmers and Mexican ...

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), TRY AND GET ME! (a.k.a. THE SOUND OF FURY) is a searing portrait of mob...

Directed by Joseph Losey • 1951 • United States
Starring John Drew Barrymore, Preston Foster, Joan Lorring

The last film director Joseph Losey made in Hollywood before being blacklisted is both a searing crime drama and a sensitive loss-of-innocence tale, bristling with hard-hitting social criti...

Directed by John Berry • 1951 • United States
Starring John Garfield, Shelley Winters, Wallace Ford

John Garfield’s final film before his blacklisting and untimely death is a slam-bang pulp noir crackling with tightly wound tension. In one of his finest performances, Garfield plays a hardened so...

Directed by Cy Endfield • 1957 • United Kingdom
Starring Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, Peggy Cummins

Blacklisted from Hollywood, American director Cy Endfield found a fresh start in Britain, where he brought a pronounced anticapitalist punch to this exciting crime drama set in the trucking industr...

Directed by Joseph Losey • 1957 • United Kingdom
Starring Michael Redgrave, Ann Todd, Leo McKern

On the day before his estranged son is scheduled to be executed for a murder he didn’t commit, an alcoholic writer (a riveting Michael Redgrave) embarks on a last-ditch attempt to save him, journeyin...

Directed by Robert Wise • 1959 • United States
Starring Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Shelley Winters

Star Harry Belafonte produced this gritty, New York–set noir, which doubles as both a tense heist thriller and an X-ray of 1950s racial tensions. In need of quick money, fallen former cop David ...