"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.

"Jamaica Inn" (1939)

Alfred Hitchcock only made three costume pictures in his entire career, it wasn't a genre he was entirely comfortable with, "I'm always thinking 'where do they go to the bathroom?'" Much maligned (even by the master himself), a fresh look proves there's a lot to like about this moody tale of early 19th Century coastal scalawags. Adapted from Daphne DuMaurier's atmospheric but somewhat plodding bestseller, the plot was smartly re-structured to align with one of the director's laws of suspense: give the audience more information than the characters. We learn quickly who the bad guy is, when will the heroine? Therein lies the tension. A winsome Maureen O'Hara, just a teenager and making her solid film debut, is a young English lass who comes to live with her long lost aunt and uncle in the title establishment, a place of nefarious reputation. See, Uncle, a craggy Leslie Banks, is the leader of a band of "wreckers", land pirates who lure unsuspecting ships to their doom on the treacherous Cornish rocks and then scoop up the booty killing all aboard. Headstrong O'Hara will have none of it, and she enlists the nearby kindly squire, Charles Laughton, to help undo the deadly dealings. The whole affair is filled with little Hitchcockian touches, you can't tamp down pure talent, but the most fascinating realization when watching is that the entire picture was shot on studio sets. Shipwrecks. Crashing waves. Rocky coasts. Horse drawn carriages traipsing up and down the desolate English moors. All created in a controlled environment and it looks superb. Unbelievable  film craftsmanship that deserves a viewing.