Lifeboat (1944)

There's a terrific scene early on where the lifeboat swings around and our attention moves from Tallulah Bankhead's character, who falls out of focus and becomes slightly muted, to a group of other characters towards the front of the boat, who come into focus and become audible, revealing how cleverly Alfred Hitchcock manages and keeps interesting his adaptation of John Steinbeck's story, a confined-space war drama set almost start to finish on a lifeboat.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Mask of Dimitros (1944)

What many say is Eric Ambler's best book is adapted faithfully here to the big screen with Peter Lorre in the lead role as the detective writer Leyden who becomes obsessed with chronicling the life of a murder victim washed up on a beach in Istanbul - Dimitrios Makropoulos, whom Leyden discovers, as he journeys across Europe and Asia talking with the dead man's victims, was a swindler, a spy, assassin, forger, drug dealer,  blackmailer, grifter, thief, and, in the book, even a human trafficker!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

The Suspect (1944)

After she threatens to reveal his dalliances with a pretty wee thing whom he romances and takes to the theatre, a respected shopkeeper played by Charles Laughton kills his wife and makes it look like an accident, in this competent melodrama that has a few memorable noir thrills, particularly a Rope-like scene involving a hastily concealed body, but the movie never tells you why you should be sympathetic towards this monster or why you should care less about his being caught or not until the final punchline when the film, and the man, regains a moral compass.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Laura (1944)

Like Hitchcock's Rebecca released four years earlier, the title character of this Otto Preminger-directed mystery thriller, Laura, casts a spell over everyone and like Rebecca, she's dead at the movie's outset but nonetheless presides over every scene, particularly as there is a portrait of her that watches over her apartment where Dana Andrew's detective, a man in a fedora who calls women 'dames' (for this is pessimistic film noir, not Du Maurier's romantic thriller) is investigating Laura's murder at the hands of one of her society friends.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Woman in the Window (1944)

In director Fritz Lang’s 1944 film noir full of great moments but dopey on the whole, a psychology professor played by Edward G Robinson has to dream up a way out of a terrible pickle when the woman whose portrait in a shop window he admires turns up in real life, invites him back to her apartment for a drink and before you can say, “What would your wife and kids think of this?”, the two become embroiled in murder, body disposal and blackmail!

★★☆☆☆ 

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Scarlet Claw (1944)

The opening credits attribute the "original" story to a pair of plagiarists, suggesting they've only based their plot on the characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but anyone can see the debt this eighth of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies owes The Hound of the Baskervilles with its murder on the foggy moors committed by a phosphorescent monster; however, before you groan at having watched it all before, remember Basil Rathbone in black-and-white is Sidney Paget's illustrations come-to-life, and here Holmes - on the hunt for a villain as diabolical as any seen in cinema to 1944 - becomes involved in some deliciously creepy scenes including one so good it was used again by Scorsese in his Cape Fear 47 years later.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ministry of Fear (1944)

Graham Greene's novel The Ministry of Fear is an 'entertainment' rather than one of his more literary thrillers (like his novels heavy with Catholicism and imbued with authentic world detail from the author's real-life as a wartime spy) and Fritz Lang delivers his adaptation as just that - a shallow and quite ridiculous - but fun - film noir entertainment like a John Buchan thriller, with spies operating country fair fortune-teller booths and with forces for good and bad both chasing a cake that survives despite being wrested from the arms of multiple owners, partially eaten, involved in a bombing, and despite spending time in a bird's nest!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Double Indemnity (1944)

Like a blonde bombshell in stilettoes, this hardboiled classic grabs your attention with everyone in it talking smart and fast, see, including Fred MacMurray's insurance salesman whose double indemnity insurance scam and murder plot threatens to become unstuck. 

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW