Noirvember

Noirvember

30 Episodes

Whether you’re just getting started on your journey into film noir’s dark world of glamorous femme fatales and down-on-their-luck average Joes, interested in exploring new avenues, or just want to rewatch your favorites, there’s no better time of year to soak in the atmosphere of Hollywood’s shadowiest crime pictures than Noirvember. Inaugurated in 2010 by critic Marya E. Gates, Noirvember is a yearly, monthlong celebration of all things noir. Bringing together stone-cold classics like THE MALTESE FALCON and LAURA, genre-bending gems like THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, and innovative indies like MURDER BY CONTRACT, this collection will lead you down a few of noir’s darkest alleys.

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Noirvember
  • They Drive by Night

    Episode 1

    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...

  • High Sierra

    Episode 2

    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...

  • The Maltese Falcon

    Episode 3

    Directed by John Huston • 1941 • United States
    Starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor

    A cinematic landmark for a number of reasons—it was the first film directed by John Huston, the film that launched Humphrey Bogart to stardom, and one of the first true noirs—this breathlessly entert...

  • The Face Behind the Mask

    Episode 4

    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...

  • Double Indemnity

    Episode 5

    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...

  • Laura

    Episode 6

    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...

  • Detour

    Episode 7

    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 ...

  • Gilda

    Episode 8

    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...

  • The Man I Love

    Episode 9

    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...

  • Desert Fury

    Episode 10

    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...

  • Odd Man Out

    Episode 11

    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 ...

  • Brute Force

    Episode 12

    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 ...

  • The Big Clock

    Episode 13

    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 ...

  • The Naked City

    Episode 14

    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...

  • Brighton Rock

    Episode 15

    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...

  • The Woman in Question

    Episode 16

    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...

  • The Killer That Stalked New York

    Episode 17

    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...

  • On Dangerous Ground

    Episode 18

    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...

  • So Long at the Fair

    Episode 19

    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...

  • The Sniper

    Episode 20

    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...

  • The Big Heat

    Episode 21

    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)...

  • Human Desire

    Episode 22

    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...

  • MR. ARKADIN: The Comprehensive Version

    Episode 23

    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 ...

  • The Night of the Hunter

    Episode 24

    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...