42 articles
And Then There Were None (1945 film)
And Then There Were None (1945) is René Clair's American film adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1939 novel and 1943 play, Hollywood's first Christie adaptation, starring Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, and Louis Hayward, with the play's two-survivor ending.
Angels with Dirty Faces
Angels with Dirty Faces is a 1938 Warner Bros. gangster drama directed by Michael Curtiz, starring James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan, Pat O'Brien as Father Jerry, Humphrey Bogart, and the Dead End Kids, famous for its electric-chair ending and 2024 National Film Registry induction.
Contraband (1940 film)
Contraband (US title Blackout) is a 1940 British comedy spy-thriller, the second Powell–Pressburger collaboration, starring Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson in blackout London; considered the first British fiction film about World War II.
Dark Passage (film)
Dark Passage (1947) is a Warner Bros. film noir directed by Delmer Daves, the third Bogart-Bacall film, in which escaped convict Vincent Parry undergoes plastic surgery; its first third uses subjective first-person camera.
Double Indemnity
Double Indemnity: 1944 Billy Wilder film noir, also known by Cain's novella title, in which insurance salesman Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson murder her husband for a double indemnity payout; seven Oscar nominations, no wins.
Drunken Angel (醉いどれ天使)
Drunken Angel (醉いどれ天使, Yoidore tenshi) is Akira Kurosawa's 1948 Toho drama about an alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) treating a tubercular yakuza (Toshiro Mifune) in postwar Tokyo's black market; their first of 16 collaborations and Kinema Junpo's best Japanese film of 1948.
Green for Danger
Green for Danger: 1944 Christianna Brand whodunit and its 1946 Sidney Gilliat film, in which postman Joseph Higgins dies on an operating table during V-1 raids and Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim) investigates seven hospital staff.
High Sierra (film)
High Sierra (1941) is a Raoul Walsh Warner Bros. crime drama starring Humphrey Bogart as Roy "Mad Dog" Earle and Ida Lupino, from W. R. Burnett's novel, scripted with John Huston; a gangster-to-noir landmark remade twice.
La Chienne
La Chienne (The Bitch) is Jean Renoir's 1931 French drama, his second sound film, adapted from Georges de la Fouchardière's novel. Michel Simon plays a clerk-painter exploited by Lulu and her pimp Dédé; Fritz Lang remade it as Scarlet Street (1945).
Lady in the Lake
Lady in the Lake names a 1947 MGM film noir directed by and starring Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe, and a 2024 Apple TV+ miniseries starring Natalie Portman.
Le Jour se lève
Le Jour se lève (Daybreak) is Marcel Carné's 1939 French poetic-realist drama, scripted by Jacques Viot with dialogues by Jacques Prévert, starring Jean Gabin, Arletty and Jules Berry; told in flashbacks during a police siege, banned under Vichy, restored in 4K in 2014.
Leave Her to Heaven
Leave Her to Heaven (1945), John M. Stahl's Technicolor melodrama-noir adapted from Ben Ames Williams's novel, stars Gene Tierney as the murderous, obsessively jealous Ellen Berent; Fox's biggest 1940s hit, it won Leon Shamroy a color cinematography Oscar.
Little Caesar
Little Caesar (1931) is the Mervyn LeRoy pre-Code Warner Bros./First National gangster film starring Edward G. Robinson as Rico Bandello, which launched the Hollywood gangster genre and entered the National Film Registry in 2000.
M (1931 film)
M (M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder) is Fritz Lang's 1931 German sound film about a Berlin child murderer, Hans Beckert, played by Peter Lorre, hunted by police and underworld alike; famous for its whistled Peer Gynt motif and banned in 1934.
Manhattan Melodrama
Manhattan Melodrama: 1934 MGM crime drama directed by W. S. Van Dyke, starring Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy; won Arthur Caesar a Best Story Oscar, introduced "Blue Moon," and was the last film John Dillinger saw before FBI agents shot him in 1934.
Marked Woman
Marked Woman is a 1937 Warner Bros. crime drama directed by Lloyd Bacon, starring Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, loosely based on the Lucky Luciano vice trial, with prostitutes recast as nightclub hostesses under the Production Code.
Murder!
Murder! (1930), also known in its German version as Mary, is an Alfred Hitchcock mystery-thriller for British International Pictures, adapted from the novel Enter Sir John by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, starring Herbert Marshall as a juror actor clearing a convicted actress, notable for early sound experiments.
Night Train to Munich
Night Train to Munich (1940), also released as Gestapo, is a Carol Reed British comedy spy-thriller starring Margaret Lockwood, Rex Harrison, and Paul Henreid, written by Launder and Gilliat as a follow-up to The Lady Vanishes.
Number Seventeen
Number Seventeen (Number 17) is Alfred Hitchcock's 1932 British International Pictures comedy-thriller adapted from J. Jefferson Farjeon's play, starring Leon M. Lion; his last BIP film and first use of a MacGuffin, with a bus-versus-train chase climax.
Pépé le Moko
Pépé le Moko (1937), Julien Duvivier's French poetic-realist crime drama starring Jean Gabin as a gangster hiding in the Casbah of Algiers, adapted from Henri La Barthe's 1931 novel, remade in Hollywood as Algiers and Casbah.
Pickup on South Street
Pickup on South Street (Le port de la drogue in France) is a 1953 Samuel Fuller film noir for Twentieth Century-Fox starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, and Thelma Ritter, about a pickpocket who steals Communist spy microfilm; Ritter was Oscar-nominated and the film joined the National Film Registry in 2018.
Quai des Orfèvres
Quai des Orfèvres is a 1947 French crime film by Henri-Georges Clouzot, adapted from Stanislas-André Steeman's Légitime défense, starring Louis Jouvet, Suzy Delair, and Bernard Blier; it won Venice's best director prize and revived Clouzot's post-blacklisting career.
Rope (film)
Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock's first Technicolor film and first Transatlantic Pictures release, adapts Patrick Hamilton's Leopold-and-Loeb-inspired play, shot in ten-minute takes disguised as one continuous 80-minute shot, starring James Stewart, John Dall, and Farley Granger.
Sabotage (1936 film)
Sabotage is Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 British thriller, loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, in which cinema owner Karl Verloc's time bomb kills his wife's young brother on a London bus.
Saboteur
Saboteur (1942) is Alfred Hitchcock's American espionage thriller for Universal, starring Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane, and Norman Lloyd, in which a wrongly accused factory worker chases a Nazi saboteur to a Statue of Liberty finale; distinct from Hitchcock's 1936 Sabotage.
Scarface (1932 film)
Scarface (1932), also released as Scarface: The Shame of the Nation, is a Howard Hawks gangster film produced by Howard Hughes, starring Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, a Capone-inspired Chicago mobster; famous for its machine-gun violence, year-long censorship battle, and 1994 National Film Registry selection.
Secret Agent
Secret Agent (1936) is Alfred Hitchcock's British espionage thriller starring John Gielgud, Madeleine Carroll, and Peter Lorre, adapted from Campbell Dixon's play and Maugham's Ashenden, about a faked-death spy hunting a German agent in Switzerland.
Shadow of a Doubt
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller starring Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright, in which a serial killer hides with relatives in Santa Rosa, California; written by Thornton Wilder, it was Hitchcock's stated favorite film.
Spellbound (1945 film)
Spellbound (1945) is Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, produced by David O. Selznick, with a Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence and Miklós Rózsa's Oscar-winning theremin score, based on The House of Dr. Edwardes.
Stray Dog (野良犬) (film)
Stray Dog (野良犬, Nora inu) is Akira Kurosawa's 1949 Japanese crime film, 122 minutes, in which detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), with veteran Sato (Takashi Shimura), hunts his stolen Colt pistol through postwar Tokyo's black market.