Directed by Raoul Walsh • 1940 • United States
Starring George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino

Humphrey Bogart and George Raft share a driving ambition in this feisty tale of brothers trying to make a go of their independent trucking enterprise. After ten years of the Great Depression, scrappy Jo...

Directed by Raoul Walsh • 1941 • United States
Starring Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, Alan Curtis

Marking the moment when the gritty gangster sagas of the 1930s began giving way to the romantic fatalism of ’40s film noir, HIGH SIERRA also contains the star-making performance of Humphrey Bogart, w...

Directed by Robert Florey • 1941 • United States
Starring Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe

Directed with striking expressionist flair by French émigré filmmaker Robert Florey, this poisonous tale of the American dream turned sour stars Peter Lorre as Janos, a Hungarian immigrant who arrives...

Directed by Billy Wilder • 1944 • United States
Starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

Has dialogue ever been more perfectly hard-boiled? Has a femme fatale ever been as deliciously wicked as Barbara Stanwyck? And has 1940s Los Angeles ever looked so seductively sordid? Wo...

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 Charles Vidor • 1946 • United States
Starring Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready

“Gilda, are you decent?” Rita Hayworth tosses her hair back and slyly responds, “Me?” in one of the great star entrances in movie history. GILDA, directed by Charles Vidor, features a sultry Hayw...

Directed by Raoul Walsh • 1946 • United States
Starring Ida Lupino, Robert Alda, Andrea King

Bathed in a downbeat noir mood and smoky jazz-lounge atmosphere, this haunting melodrama stars Ida Lupino as husky-voiced singer Petey Brown, who takes a job performing in a divey nightclub. She’s carryi...

Directed by Lewis Allen • 1947 • United States
Starring John Hodiak, Lizabeth Scott, Burt Lancaster

Lurid Technicolor, deep-dish melodrama, and gay subtext abound in this pulpy noir firecracker. In the desert town of Chuckawalla, Nevada, tempers flare, passions spark, and violence erupts when Pa...

Directed by Carol Reed • 1947 • United Kingdom
Starring James Mason, Kathleen Ryan, Robert Newton

Taking place largely over the course of one tense night, Carol Reed’s psychological noir, set in an unnamed Belfast, stars James Mason as a revolutionary ex-con leading a robbery that goes horribly ...

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 John Farrow • 1948 • United States
Starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan

One of the finest suspense thrillers of the 1940s, THE BIG CLOCK stars Ray Milland as a hapless crime-magazine editor plunged into a web of danger when he begins being systematically framed ...

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 John Boulting • 1948 • United Kingdom
Starring Richard Attenborough, Hermione Baddeley, William Hartnell

One of darkest and most sordid of all British noirs, this startlingly bleak, violent adaptation of the novel by Graham Greene delves into the seedy underbelly of the seaside reso...

Directed by Anthony Asquith • 1950 • United Kingdom
Starring Jean Kent, Dirk Bogarde, John McCallum

Fortune teller Agnes Huston (Jean Kent), a.k.a. Madame Astra, has been murdered—but that’s about all anyone can agree on as five different perspectives on the dead woman’s personality come to ligh...

Directed by Earl McEvoy • 1950 • United States
Starring Evelyn Keyes, Charles Korvin, Dorothy Malone

Based on a true story, this race-against-the-clock thriller follows the frantic efforts to stop a potentially deadly epidemic before it turns catastrophic. Jewel smuggler Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Ke...

Directed by Nicholas Ray • 1951 • United States
Starring Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Ward Bond

When hardened big-city police detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) roughs up one too many suspects, he’s sent to the countryside to cool his heels and help search for the murderer of a small-town schoolg...

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 Edward Dmytryk • 1952 • United States
Starring Adolphe Menjou, Arthur Franz, Gerald Mohr

Blacklisted director Edward Dmytryk—one of the original Hollywood Ten—made his return to filmmaking with this disturbingly prescient psychological thriller. Shot with gritty, documentary-style re...

Directed by Fritz Lang • 1953 • United States
Starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin

Fritz Lang’s hard-boiled cop vs. criminals yarn stars Glenn Ford as Dave Bannion, a police detective and family man driven by grief to conduct a relentless vendetta against a mobster (Alexander Scourby)...

Directed by Fritz Lang • 1954 • United States
Starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford

In this adaptation of Emile Zola’s “La bête humaine,” veteran Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) returns from Korea to his job as a railroad engineer and quickly succumbs to the advances of his boss's wif...

Directed by Orson Welles • 1955 • United States
Starring Orson Welles, Paola Mori, Robert Arden

Orson Welles’s MR. ARKADIN (a.k.a. CONFIDENTIAL REPORT) tells the story of an elusive billionaire who hires an American smuggler to investigate his past, leading to a dizzying descent into a cold-war ...

Directed by Charles Laughton • 1955 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, i...

Directed by Jacques Tourneur • 1956 • United States
Starring Brian Keith, Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft

Directed by Jacques Tourneur from one of the masterful, despairing novels of David Goodis, NIGHTFALL is the tale of an innocent man trapped in a senseless and lethal web of seduction and crime. The...