Directed by Stuart Heisler • 1942 • United States
Starring Brian Donlevy, Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd

The second screen adaptation of the novel by Dashiell Hammett reteams popular pairing Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd for a hard-boiled tale of political intrigue, corruption, romance, and murder. Croo...

Directed by Otto Preminger • 1944 • United States
Starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb

One of the most sophisticated noirs of the 1940s, Otto Preminger’s classic mystery stars Gene Tierney as Laura Hunt, a Manhattan advertising executive who is murdered just before she is set to mar...

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer • 1945 • United States
Starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage

From Poverty Row came a movie that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes the dark fatalism at the heart of film noir. As he hitchhikes his way from New York to Los Angeles, a down-on-his-luck nightclub pianist ...

Directed by Otto Preminger • 1945 • United States
Starring Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell

A shady Dana Andrews is caught between pure-hearted Alice Faye and a memorably dissolute Linda Darnell in this fatalistic journey into the dark underbelly of small-town America, which reunited the ...

Directed by Sidney Gilliat • 1946 • United Kingdom
Starring Trevor Howard, Sally Gray, Alastair Sim

In the midst of Nazi air raids, a postman dies on the operating table at a rural English hospital. But was the death accidental? A delightful and wholly unexpected murder mystery, British writer/d...

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 Edmund Goulding • 1947 • United States
Starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray

Darkness lurks behind the bright lights of a traveling carnival in one of the most haunting and perverse film noirs of the 1940s. Adapted from the scandalous best seller by William Lindsay Gresha...

Directed by Jules Dassin • 1948 • United States
Starring Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart

“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” as the narrator immortally states at the close of this breathtakingly vivid film and this is one of them. Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin a...

Directed by Carol Reed • 1949 • United Kingdom
Starring Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli

Pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, black-market opportunist Harry Lime—and thus begins this l...

Directed by David Lean • 1950 • United Kingdom
Starring Ann Todd, Ivan Desny, Norman Wooland

One of David Lean’s most neglected and atypical works is an engrossing dramatization of the true crime that shocked nineteenth-century Scotland. Ann Todd stars in the title role of the wealthy socialite ...

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 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 Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough • 1950 • United Kingdom
Starring Jean Simmons, Dirk Bogarde, David Tomlinson

Mystery and menace are afoot at the 1889 Paris Exposition in this tense thriller from the studio that made atmospheric period dramas its specialty, Gainsborough Pictures...

Directed by Robert Wise • 1951 • United States
Starring Richard Basehart, Valentina Cortese, William Lundigan

This intriguing, richly atmospheric film noir unfolds in a spooky Victorian mansion below Coit Tower in San Francisco. Victoria Kowelska (Valentina Cortese) has lived through World War I...

Directed by Basil Dearden • 1959 • United Kingdom

A beautiful female college student is found dead in a public park; the police soon discover that her murder may have been racially motivated. Basil Dearden's bold, direct police procedural, starring Nigel Patrick as the detective in charge of t...

Directed by Basil Dearden • 1962 • United Kingdom

Othello is translated to the world of sixties London jazz clubs in Basil Dearden's smoky and sensational All Night Long. Over the course of one eventful evening, the anniversary celebration of the musical and romantic partners Aurelius Rex (Pau...