"The Red House" (1947)

Is it possible for a movie to be film noir and not be set in the dark alleys and shadowy streets of the city? If any movie successfully comes close to pulling it off then "The Red House" is it. Helmed by Delmer Daves (he would direct a fine noir the following year with Bogie and Bacall, "Dark Passage") this atomospheric mystery thriller takes place entirely in the bucolic world of a sleepy rural community. But with the angst and psychological feel of the noir genre. Kindly farmer Edward G. Robinson and his sister, Judith Anderson, have an adopted teenage daughter (Allene Roberts). She's got a crush on a local boy (Lon McCallister) who's the new hired hand. Trouble begins when the teens ignore the dire warnings of Robinson and start to venture off the farm and into the local woods, a place he has deemed strictly verboten because, well, there's a mysterious red house their where spooky unmentionable things once happened. Are you starting to catch all the not-so-subtle symbolism here? Forbidden places, burgeoning sexuality, coming of age, it's all here at a fever pitch. Throw another couple of naughty teens into the forrest, played by the unbelievably gorgeous Rory Calhoun and Julie London, who vie for our heroes' budding love and libidos, and you've got a steamy stew of secrets and young lust that would make Bruno Bettelheim blush. From Little Red Riding Hood to the Blair Witch, there's always a good scare to be had when you go deep into the woods. Follow this troupe and you won't be disappointed.

"The Night of the Iguana" (1964)

The lurid tagline was "One man...three women...one night...", obviously trying to cash in on the sultry psycho-sexual plots of other films adapted from Tennessee Williams' plays. But this one was something different, a tale of finding redemption and inner peace with life's demons. A disparate group of lonely types find themselves in a remote corner of Mexico removed from civilization in a down-at-the-heels hotel. A defrocked alcoholic priest hanging on to the last shreds of his faith (Richard Burton), a saintly vagabond artist caring for her elderly father (Deborah Kerr), a shrewish Bible thumper on a cook's tour (Oscar nominated Grayson Hall), and the hotel's earthy free-sprit proprietor (Ava Gardner). These lives are at their at the end of their rope just like the metaphorical iguana tied under the property's porch. Maybe one night's soul searching will set everyone free. The acting is aces all around. Burton was always good at inner anguish. Kerr makes decency attractive when it could easily be off-putting. And Gardner shines. She's loose, bawdy, and sexy as hell, never better. It took the rascally director John Huston to corral these big personalities and the result is a fine adaptation of a rare open-hearted Williams piece.

"To Be or Not To Be" (1942)

Jack Benny's movie career was mostly a grabbag of film shorts, lightweight comedies, and cameos. His lengthy career in vaudeville, radio, and TV are really what kept his star burnished for decades. But he did have one truly excellent film to his credit, one helmed by a master director with a first rate script and stellar supporting cast. And it was an out and out bomb. If ever there was the right picture at the very wrong time, "To Be or Not To Be" was it. It's a WWII thriller-comedy about a Polish theatre troupe putting on subversive anti-Nazi plays making fun of Hitler and the Third Reich while they try to foil a plot that could endanger the underground resistance. With the real Axis powers goose--stepping through Europe and the Pearl Harbor attack just four months prior, the picture was doomed from the get-go. To add to the tragedy, Benny's co-star, the luminous Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash a few weeks before the release date. But time has been kind and it's now a comedy classic. The movie zips from farcical gags, perfectly timed banter, to hairbreadth escapes in a flash, all the while making some serious commentary on the the damnable madness of the Nazi scourge. Benny has the timing of Swiss watch and Lombard was that rare combo platter of smarts and sex appeal. A comic gem.

"And Then There Were None" (1945)

French director René Clair made relatively few films outside his native France but his adaptation of Agatha Christie's most famous of whodunnit puzzlers was made in Hollwood and it's first rate, still probably the best version of this mystery ever filmed. There's a light touch to what is essentially a horrific premise: a fiendish murderer has invited ten strangers for a weekend getaway to a secluded mansion on a  small island off the English coast and the guests are eliminated, some gruesomely, one by one in the fashion of a children's nursery rhyme, ("Ten little Indian boys went out to dine, one choked his little self, and then there were nine"...you get it). Each of he guests has a nefarious incident in their past where they themselves caused the death of an innocent, the killer is playing a deadly game of judge and jury. In between the mayhem and fingerpointing among the culprits, you get funny dialog and a few well-placed shivers. The cast is first rate, boasting some of the great character actors of the time like Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald, and Judith Anderson. Don't even attempt trying to figure out the identity of the murderer, Dame Agatha was too skillful for that. Just enjoy watching the puzzle unfold right up to the last macabre joke before the endtitles.

"The Wages of Fear" (Le Salaire de la Peur) (1953)

You come to this French film with the knowledge that it's one of the most edge-of-your-seat thrillers ever made. But, really, it was made almost 65 years ago, it's probably a little tame by today's standards, right? WRONG. It not only lives up to the lore but it exceeds it. How could it not with this--pun intended--powderkeg of a plot: a group of ragtag, down-on-their-luck oil workers have to deliver two truckloads full of nitroglycerin over an impossibly treacherous 300 miles of backroads in some Godforsaken South American country to a blazing refinery fire so that it can be extinguished. The first hour is all about the set up and character exposition, if we didn't care for these sad fellows then none of the rest of the picture makes sense. Once they hit the road, they're put through one white knuckle setpiece with those trucks after another. These scenes are almost Rube Goldbergian in complexity and these players have to figure out each 'trap' or they're blown to Kingdom Come. The director, Henri-Georg Clouzot, is oftentimes referred to as "the French Hitchcock", with good measure. Each scene is not only squrm-inducingly suspenseful, but character defining as well. The break out star is Yves Montand. Handsome as all get-out, brashly cocksure, and filled with almost fatally flawed hubris, you want to throttle him for being so reckless. There's not a little commentary about the rapacious nature of the big American oil company that is giving so little value to the lives of these men, and by extension to the environment it's harming. You can bet that if Big Oil was a bad thing back then it's even worse now. Minute for minute as exciting as the best roller coaster you've ever ridden, don't miss this one.

"Eyes of Laura Mars" (1978)

Director Irvin Kirshner did something pretty special here. He captured the visceral pulsating atmosphere of the dying days of that immoral Me Decade, the 1970's, and the cultural nexus where all that grime, grit, glitter, and glamour was in full swing, the scary and wonderful New York City that President Ford had written off with a tart 'drop dead', but was still a thriving hothouse of creativity and social taboo busting. It's all wrapped in a so-so thriller, but the plot, pure Hollywood twaddle,  is beside the point. It's all about the visual milieu, the dirty streets, downtown discos, and pre-mall-ified SoHo. Faye Dunaway is a high fashion photographer who's work is a mixture of style and violence, sex and danger. Gorgeous models are coldly impassive in tableaux vivant with guns, blood, fire, wrecked cars, and barking Dobermans. It's Helmut Newton gone even more gonzo. But just like that she starts suffering from psychic spells where she's seeing through the point of view of a crazed killer's eyes. Everyone around her is getting bumped off. Dunaway pulls off the balance of strong career gal and vulnerable victim admirably, and she probably never looked better on film. Those cheekbones and stiletto heeled long legs were made to play a couture ice goddess. An earnest Tommy Lee Jones shows up as the hunky detective assigned to crack the implausible case and to save (and bed) Dunaway. If you don't see the identity of the murderer coming from a mile away you're more blind than Laura Mars. Just revel in the time capsule nature of the film and take yourself into that exciting pre-scrubbed-up Manhattan of yesterday where the dangerous mixed with the chic, and the result was decadently stimulating.

"A Place in the Sun" (1951)

Film noir can be hardbitten and cynical or lushly romantic, but there's one rule characters in the genre must live by: the deterministic, inexorable power of Fate. In this haunting effort, an streamlined updating of Theodor Dreiser's dense novel "An American Tragedy", Montgomery Clift is an eager but poor young man who travels cross country to work in his rich uncle's clothing factory. He can see before him all the possibility of what wealth can bring, clothes, cars, big homes, and most importantly, a girl. And what a girl this is. Elizabeth Taylor in her first adult role ("Before that, all my leading men were either dogs or horses."). Her Angela Vickers is the embodiment of everything post WWII American men wanted and what women wanted to be. It wasn't an easy role, she's aspirational but not haughty, flirty but not off-putting, sexual but still innocent. No wonder Clift falls hard for her. But of course, there's a problem: he's gotten his previous girlfriend pregnant, a drab and dowdy scene-stealing Shelley Winters. If only this Debbie Downer were out of the way, and that's when things turn sinister. Director George Stevens alternates between the two worlds tearing at Clift, the working class dead-end life with Winters, and the glamorous enviable world of Taylor, with languorous overlapping dissolves. And effective way of juxtaposing the dichotomies. And was there ever a more attractive screen pairing than Taylor and Clift? Their famous kissing close-ups are rapturously beautiful. And as added eye candy you get Edith Head's much-copied ball gown, the one with a spray of white lilacs showcasing Taylor's bosom. One look at her in that get-up and he's a goner for sure. Just like us the audience.