Foreign Intrigue (1956)

When, in 1959, Hitchcock made North By Northwest, he had to have been aware of this 1956 thriller which features a suave hero - here, it's Robert Mitchum with a suit and slicked hair playing a personal secretary to one of the world's richest men - who becomes embroiled in an foreign intrigue after the death of his employer, and like Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill, Robert Mitchum's Dave Bishop ends up in exotic locations around the world romancing a mysterious blonde, encountering mysterious trenchcoats, in a plot involving identity mix-ups and duplicitous femme fatales (and their mothers), all presented in a richly-detailed, unhurried technicolour - a solid romantic suspense movie, albeit one that flags a little at the two-third mark unlike the rivetting from start to finish North By Northwest.

★★★★☆

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Serenity (2019)

Interstellar, another movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a father separated by vast stretches of time and space from his child, was released five years earlier than Serenity, which is surprising because Serenity feels like the retro, 8-bit, pixelated version, playing with similar themes but in a story that awkwardly melds '40s film noir with family drama and a tuna-fishing adventure, all steeped in odd moments of reality-bending fantasy that may signal McConaughey's character's post-war trauma playing havoc with his head - or else something else delivered in not very stellar fashion.

★★☆☆☆ 

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The Big Sleep (1946)

Even Humphrey Bogart said he didn't know what was happening scene-to-scene in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private eye crime story, and having just read the book, I can attest that the film is faithful to its sprawling mess of a plot - sprawling because Chandler in fact wrote it by fusing two previously published short stories, merging characters, renaming others, caring less about resolving plot threads and more about building not so much a mystery as a noir character study of criminal California circa 1940, delivered in hilarious deadpan and steeped in worldweary immorality.

★★★★☆

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Another Man's Poison (1951)

This noir introduces us to Bette Davis' crime novelist, living in a gothic mansion by a windswept moor, who, we discover from the opening scene's whispered telephone box conversation, is having an affair, and from this strong thriller set-up, the movie proceeds as if trying to check off every thriller box imaginable - a dead body in a study,  an imposter and a fake marriage, a bank robbery, a criminal on the loose, not to mention animal murder and even My Cousin Rachel-style vehicle tampering - and more and more, until it runs wildly away with itself, though thankfully Davis seems aware of the absurdity and plays it for all it is worth.

★★★☆☆

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Featuring Dashiell Hammett's gumshoe Sam Spade - a character played in film twice before but immortalised here by Humphrey Bogart - this noir classic gives Sam Spade plenty of opportunity to stand up to big 'fat men' crime bosses, deflate femme fatale molls, and talk smart to cops-on-the-beat while being hired and rehired to chase an invaluable jewel-encrusted bird statue.

★★★★☆

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南方车站的聚会 (Nanfang chezhan de juhui) (The Wild Goose Lake (2019)

This crime drama is a touch overloaded with cinematic flourishes — there is a police hunt in a zoo at night, a scene in a funhouse full of mirrors, luminescent night-bootscooting, disconcerting moments as the camera swings between twins, and loads of noirish shadow-play — but with the style and slinkiness of In The Mood For Love, sharing that classic's bold colour palette and muted sexy tone but applied to a gritty modern-day crime story, it is an utterly capivating thriller about man-on-the-run Zedong Zhou, a small-time crim caught up in big-time crime, and the prostitute who may be helping him...or might she in fact be after the reward for bringing him in?

★★★★☆

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Ten to sen (aka 'Points and Lines' or 'Point and Line') (点と線) (1958)

Seiichi Matsumoto's mystery, a mere slip of a book written in the spare style of Simenon, is in some ways the counter to Hitchcock's A Lady Vanishes - instead of disappearing from a train, here one character steadfastly appears on one while detectives suspect he was elsewhere - but to say more would ruin the surprise of both the book and this faithful 1958 adaptation that opens with a Vertigo-style animated journey across the points and lines of a train map set to a jaunty discordant thriller score, barrels like an express train through its mystery, and ends with a solution to an impossible crime as ingenious as it is simple, hinging on a trick that is uniquely Japanese - there'll never be a Western adaptation! 

★★★★★

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Gutland (2016)

Gutland (literally 'The Good Land') is a large part of Luxembourg, I didn't know, and is presumably where this rural noir is set: Jes turns up one day looking for farmhard work, but the fact he is toting a bag full of cash suggests he has other reasons for being suddenly in this lush and peaceful, prosperous and oh-so-welcoming land, but the locals are about to be rocked by other, more menacing outsiders.

★★★★☆

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Sudden Fear (1952)

It's not a patch on Hitchcock's Suspicion from 1941  - that movie tells the same story but with humour, a grisly connection to true crimes, as well as the electric pairing of Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine - but this lesser Sudden Fear is still a gripping noir with a young Jack Palance starring as Crawford's playwright's new murderous man.

★★★☆☆

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The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Film noir often ends feeling inconsequential - why did anyone need to know that grubby little crime story? - but this 1946 classic, featuring the debut film performance of Kirk Douglas and another perfectly-cast sneering, icy performance from Barbara Stanwyck in the title role, in a story of guilt, fear, shame, and love spanning decades, is not just cynical and dark but elicits strong interest in the fates of a trio of kids, two of whom harbor a murderous secret.

★★★★☆

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The Paradine Case (1947)

Director Hitchcock and Producer Selznick's third collaboration, the rather conventional courtroom thriller The Paradine Case, based on a Robert H Hitchens book, may not soar to the heights that Rebecca and Spellbound did (their previous works together) but it is a grand and engrossing melodrama, so well-acted, directed, and staged that you can revel in it despite the ludicrousness of the central court case and despite the fact climactic scenes of Gregory Peck's lawyer's reckoning don't quite hit the nail on the head.

★★★★☆

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D.O.A. (1950)

The popwhistle sound effect every time a woman walks past is a disconcerting detail in this otherwise engrossing film noir classic about Frank Bigelow, an accountant and Lothario who has short time to investigate when a slow poisoner "murders" him.

★★★☆☆

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No Sudden Move (2021)

The elaborate costuming of the ensemble cast and period 1960s Detroit setting feel like an affectation until late in this Steven Soderbergh movie when a card is played that turns the riveting, finely-acted neo-noir crime flick into something sharper: a pointed social commentary.

★★★★☆

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Blade Runner (1982)

This classic film noir, an adaptation of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a gumshoe-turned-bounty hunter tasked with tracking down, in a future cyberpunk-neon Los Angeles of perpetual rain, six runaway replicants, androids built by the Tyrell Corporation replete with emotions and memories, making it hard for Deckard to distinguish them from humans.

★★★★☆ 

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Narrow Margin (1990)

The RKO screenplay, first filmed in 1955 and then this time in 1990, has all the ingredients of a classic thriller: a train carrying a witness to murder and thugs trying to identify her before she and her escort, a Deputy District Attorney played by Gene Hackman, get to Vancouver to testify against a Mr Big - but it all ends up silly, empty stuff with the action amounting to Hackman flinging himself sideways into a sleeping car or into a nook or into a quiet cargo hold as the inept baddies trawl up and down and up and down the train corridors ridiculously unable to pinpoint the car in which Anne Archer, the witness, sits either being breathless and scared in the dark or else engaged in long conversations with the DA somehow still able to stop by regularly for lengthy heart-to-hearts.

★★★☆☆

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House of Games (1985)

A successful author of a book about compulsive behaviours, an austere psychiatrist played by Louise Crouse, heads into a gambling house one night to confront the heavies holding a debt over one of her patients, but "nothing is as it seems" in writer-director David Mamet's terrific thriller - well, except that seasoned thriller fans won't be surprised by anything that happens - but the deliberate acting and pace grip as the psychiatrist quickly becomes a keen student in the art of the long con.

★★★★☆

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The Chase (1946)

Surely the Cornell Woolrich book doesn't unfold in the way this adaptation does, starting enterprisingly with a chump (perhaps in the book a traumatised drug-addled chump?) landing a job as a driver for a ruthless crime boss - a surprisingly ruthless crime boss, for 1947 - but, after a brief noone-believes-him moment a la The Lady Vanishes and a false murder charge a la a lot of other Hitchcock movies, about-facing in very confusing fashion - think a The Woman In The Window's it-was-all-a-dream type of about-face - rendering irrelevant all that has happened in the first half, a bit like saying to an audience halfway through a movie, "OK, forget all that...here's a quick rundown of what actually happened..."

★★★☆☆

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China Moon (1994)

The only thing missing from this unchallenging 93-minute neo-noir escapism about a cop (Ed Harris) who falls for a dame with a cheating husband and a gun (Madeleine Stowe) is the steam - cicadas chirp, fans whirr, and icecubes clink in homemade lemonade, but there isn't a sweaty underarm or beaded brow to be seen, making this more The Big Air-conditioned Studio Cool than The Big Heat.

★★★☆☆

Under the Silver Lake (2019)

Andrew Garfield is a 33-year-old Donnie Darko, jobless and just as untethered from Hollywood as Donnie was detached from High School, but where that earlier classic puzzle of a movie mesmerised, this one, a kind of neo-noir LA stoner thriller about a missing woman, is utterly tedious and nothing it eventually says about "playing life" makes up for the dreary time it takes to say it.

★☆☆☆☆

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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.

★★★★☆

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