1940s noir
see all genres ›Hardboiled tough guys and dolls in criminal trouble created an iconic template of pulp cool still influential today. The genre grew out of a mood of post-WWII disillusionment, though arguably it commenced even earlier.
Discover 1940s noir Films
Genres / Film noir / 1940s noir
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Blonde Ice
Thought lost since the early 1970s, BLONDE ICE tells the bizarre tale of a beautiful society columnist with a desire for money and position that turns her into a serial killer, a story most Hollywood studios of the 1940s wouldn't touch! The tagline, "ice in her veins, icicles in her heart" perfectly describes Claire Cummings...Start your free trial to watch -
Highway 13
It's murder on wheels when a trucking company loses several vehicles in a series of mysterious crashes, and a company honcho dies in a road accident that is equally inexplicable. Truck driver Robert Lowery soon finds himself enmeshed in the whodunit, which involves a cafe truck stop, an ex-gangster mechanic and indications of...Start your free trial to watch
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Mr. District Attorney
When Harvard Law School graduate P. Cadwallader Jones (Dennis O'Keele) bungles his first assignment in the D.A.'s office, he is next assigned the made-work job of reviewing the closed case of a crooked city official (Peter Lorre) who vanished with a stolen $100,000. The cold case suddenly gets hot when the...Start your free trial to watch -
Ringside
Middleweight boxer Tom Brown works his way up to a title fight, but loses it along with his eyesight when champion John Cason, aware that Joe is blind in one eye, goes to work on the other. Brown's brother, concert pianist Don Barry, decides to take up boxing and settle the score. When the smoke of battle clears, will he have...Start your free trial to watch -
Scarlet Street
When middle-aged milquetoast Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) rescues street-walking bad girl Kitty (Joan Bennett) from the rain slicked gutters of an eerily artificial backlot Greenwich Village, he plunges headlong into a whirlpool of lust, larceny and revenge. As Chris' obsession with the irresistibly vulgar Kitty grows,...Start your free trial to watch
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Shoot to Kill
This nifty "B" noir opens with a high-speed police shootout, its careening automotive headlights "exploding" into the title graphic, a promise of lurid thrills to come. We quickly learn that the city's new District Attorney and his wife were in the subsequent car crash, in the presumably discomfiting company of an escaped con...Start your free trial to watch -
Sky Liner
Attention, Homeland Security! It's GRAND HOTEL in the air as the usual wild assortment of travelers (movie actresses, eloping couples, child singers, spinsters, crooks and more) board a LaGuardia Airport flight, unaware that other passengers might be spies and counter-spies, complete with secret documents, poison and...Start your free trial to watch -
The Stranger
The 1946 thriller, THE STRANGER, features Welles as both director and actor. As Franz Kindler, Welles is a Nazi war criminal who has fled to America, where he disguises himself as a small town schoolteacher. Loretta Young stars as Mary, the young woman who falls in love with the devious, yet charming Kindler, while Edward G....Start your free trial to watch
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They Made Me a Fugitive
Set in unsettled postwar England where crime is on the upsurge, FUGITIVE is a suspenseful genre film which uses the picturesque Soho district as background to brilliant effect. The brooding and atmospheric cinematography of cameraman Otto Heller (FUNERAL IN BERLIN) is in the noir visual tradition, while...Start your free trial to watch -
Tough Assignment
Newspaper reporter Don Barry gets on the trail of a gang of beef bootleggers who terrorize local butchers and force them to buy uninspected meats. Posing as an itinerant farm worker, he even begins assembling evidence that the crooks are also cattle rustlers.Start your free trial to watch




