Collection
Essential Noir
Classic American film noir from the 1940s and 1950s.
The city after dark, a ceiling fan, a woman in a doorway who already knows how this ends. Film noir did not invent cynicism, but it gave it a camera and a cigarette. These pictures come out of wartime America and the decade that followed: insurance scams, private eyes who are not quite heroes, cops who are not quite clean. The lighting is cheap and perfect — venetian blinds, wet streets, faces half in shadow. Watch them in order and you can feel the form tightening: from Wilder's poison-pen Los Angeles to Welles's border-town nightmare, where the camera itself starts to look guilty.
An insurance representative is seduced by a dissatisfied housewife into a scheme of insurance fraud and murder that arouses the suspicion of his colleague, a claims investigator.
Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wealthy General Sternwood regarding a matter involving his youngest daughter Carmen. Before the complex case is over, Marlowe sees murder, blackmail, deception, and what might be love.
The peaceful life of a gas station owner is disrupted when a man from his past arrives in town and forces him to return to the dark world he had tried to escape.
In postwar Vienna, Austria, Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, arrives penniless as a guest of his childhood chum Harry Lime, only to learn he has died. Martins develops a conspiracy theory after learning of a "third man" present at the time of Harry's death, running into interference from British officer Major Calloway, and falling head-over-heels for Harry's grief-stricken lover, Anna.
A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.
A charming psychopath tries to coerce a tennis star into his theory that two strangers can commit the perfect crime by exchanging murders—each killing the other’s most-hated person.
After the suspicious suicide of a fellow cop, tough homicide detective Dave Bannion takes the law into his own hands when he sets out to smash a vicious crime syndicate.
A border-town bombing draws Mexican investigator Miguel Vargas into a corruption-ridden police investigation led by crooked captain Hank Quinlan, setting off a deadly struggle over power, justice, and truth.
No films in this genre.