Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era 1940-1959

A cuckolded embezzler on the verge of suicide is helped by a tout, an alcoholic playwright, and a pick-up girl to reimburse the money with a gambling sting.

Danny is a content truck driver, but his girl Peggy shows potential as a dancer and hopes he too can show ambition. Danny acquiesces and pursues boxing to please her, but the two begin to spend more time working than time together.

The wife of a rubber plantation administrator shoots a man to death and claims it was self-defense, but a letter written in her own hand may prove her undoing.

A self-conscious woman juggles adjusting to her new role as an aristocrat's wife and avoiding being intimidated by his first wife's spectral presence.

An aspiring reporter is the key witness at the murder trial of a young man accused of cutting a café owner's throat, and is soon accused of a similar crime himself.

When one of two truck-driving brothers loses an arm, they both join a transport company where the other is falsely charged as an accessory in the murder of the owner.

A mentally unstable man who has been kept in isolation for years escapes and causes trouble for his identical twin brother.

"Jigger' Pine forms a band that includes singer Ginger 'Character' Powell, wife of the trumpeter Leo Powell, and Nickie Haroyen and Peppi. All of them dedicate themselves to work as a unit and to play blues music. The dedication isn't paying off financially and, while riding the rails in a boxcar, they meet and befriend gangster Del Davis. He offers them a job at a New Jersey roadhouse, where Powell falls in love with Kay Grant, a former 'real good friend' of Davis. But when Powell learns that Character is about to have a baby, he returns to her. Jigger tries to make Kay the band's singer and, after this fails, runs off with her. She leaves him with nothing but a nervous breakdown. Back at the roadhouse, after his recovery, Kay shows up, has a quarrel with Davis, shoots and kills him, and plans to take back up with Jigger, who knows better but just can't help himself. While she is waiting in a car for him, along comes cripple Brad Ames, who she put in that condition, and he gets in and drives the car over a cliff, leaving no survivors in the two-passenger crash. The band is back together at the end, still using boxcars as their transportation, but happy playing the blues.

Following the death of publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane, reporters scramble to uncover the meaning of his final utterance: 'Rosebud.'

A struggling farmer in 1840 New Hampshire makes a pact with Satan for economic success, then enlists famed orator Daniel Webster to extract him from the consequences of his contract.

After being released from prison, notorious thief Roy Earle is hired by his old boss to help a group of inexperienced criminals plan and carry out the robbery of a California resort.

Claire Foster (Brenda Marshall) discovers that her respectable-businessman husband George Foster (Arthur Kennedy) isn't respectable and isn't a businessman, but a gunman in this remake-version of "Heat Lightning".

Why is Inspector Ed Cornell trying to railroad Frankie Christopher for the murder of model Vicky Lynn?

The housekeeper to a retired actress tries at the same time to look after her own two emotionally disturbed sisters, with dramatic results.

San Francisco private detective Sam Spade takes on a case that involves him with three eccentric criminals, a gorgeous liar and their quest for a priceless statuette, with the stakes rising after his partner is murdered.

A Brooklyn pier racketeer bullies boat-owners into paying protection money but two fed-up fishermen decide to eliminate the gangster themselves rather than complain to the police.

Robert Montgomery and George Sanders team up to play against type in this probing psychological thriller that features Ingrid Bergman as the object of their obsessions.

A detective begins to suspect that a man may be in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

In Shanghai, dragon lady 'Mother' Gin Sling operates a gambling house for wealthy patrons but she clashes with influential land developer Sir Guy Charteris who wants to put her out of business.

A shy young heiress marries a charming gentleman, and soon begins to suspect he is planning to murder her.

A female blackmailer with a disfiguring facial scar meets a plastic surgeon who offers her the possibility of looking like a normal woman.

A cynical expatriate American cafe owner struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis in French Morocco.

An American man marries a Serbian immigrant who fears that she will turn into the cat person of her homeland's fables if they are intimate together.

An amnesiac French diplomat is blackmailed for crimes that he committed before he lost his memory.

After being charged with the murder of a scientist, a young doctor must track down a Nazi spy ring to clear his name.