Home › Best noir of the 1950s.
The 1950s were the last decade of classic Hollywood film noir. The Production Code was still in force but weakening; the studio system was intact but under pressure from television and the Supreme Court's antitrust rulings; the postwar optimism of the late 1940s was curdling into Cold War paranoia. The films that emerged from this climate were often the most stripped-down and brutal of the classic noir period.
The perfect film. A dead screenwriter narrates his own murder from the opening frame. Gloria Swanson. William Holden. Billy Wilder. See the Classic Noir page for full analysis.
Streaming: Available on Paramount+
Bogart plays a screenwriter everyone suspects of murder. Gloria Grahame as the woman who provides his alibi and falls in love with him and is never entirely sure he is innocent. Nicholas Ray's most psychologically complex film.
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LOVE and HATE on his knuckles. The only film Charles Laughton ever directed. Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell. Shot by Stanley Cortez in deep expressionist shadows. A fairy tale told as nightmare.
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Two men on a train. One has a proposal. Hitchcock at his most formally precise — the carousel, the tennis match, Robert Walker's Bruno as one of cinema's most charming villains.
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The original heist film. Sam Jaffe as Doc Riedenschneider, brilliant and tragic. Every heist film since owes this one.
Streaming: Available on Criterion Channel
Billy Wilder's courtroom thriller. Tyrone Power. Charles Laughton. Marlene Dietrich. The twist that actually works.
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Richard Widmark as a pickpocket who accidentally steals microfilm. Samuel Fuller. A film that simultaneously is and mocks anti-communist paranoia.
Streaming: Available on Criterion Channel
Mickey Spillane adapted into something apocalyptic. The box. What's in the box. The great whatsit.
Streaming: Available on Criterion Channel
Sunset Boulevard (1950), In a Lonely Place (1950), The Night of the Hunter (1955), and Witness for the Prosecution (1957) are the essential 1950s noirs.
Classic Hollywood noir declined in the late 1950s. Neo-noir emerged in the 1970s with Chinatown and The Conversation.