Universal’s Criss Cross, a textbook example of film noir, features the familiar noir trappings: it revolves around a good Joe who risks everything for a beautiful woman; has an elaborate crime scheme and a sadistic villain; uses narration and flashbacks as storytelling devices; and unfolds with an air of pervasive doom. Criss Cross was directed [...]

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You know the plot—the one in which a tough, smart, cynical man is duped, and perhaps undone, by a beautiful, deceitful, grasping woman—it’s a staple of black-and-white films of the 1940s, pictures that came to be classified as film noir. Mary Astor feigned helplessness to manipulate detective Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and [...]

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When the awesomely revered director Stanley Kubrick died in 1999, months before the release of his long-awaited Eyes Wide Shut, he was as famous for his obsessively long shooting schedules, the increasing number of years between his films, and his reclusive lifestyle in London as he was as the maker of classic films. The Bronx-born [...]

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Anthony Mann’s thriller The Tall Target is similar in spirit and style to his contemporary film noir works of the late 1940s, including T-Men and Raw Deal. A crackerjack suspense film produced by MGM, The Tall Target also happens to be an uncommonly effective piece of historical fiction and a uniquely vivid period piece. It’s [...]

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T-Men was something of a practice run for Mann’s Border Incident, another socially conscious film noir. Made inexpensively for MGM—a studio whose low-budget pictures looked more expensive than many an A picture made elsewhere—Border Incident is nearly a Southwestern remake of the urban T-Men, as both films follow a pair of undercover government agents who [...]

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