"Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948)

Oh, the perils of life before smartphones and caller I.D. It could get you murdered. Barbara Stanwyck, in a performance that starts at frantic and goes up from there, is a wealthy heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, "the Cough Drop Queen" as the tabloids dub her. She's a bedridden invalid all alone in her Sutton Place swankienda who overhears a couple of thugs plotting her death on a party line. The whole movie is then told in flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks to show us how she got in this pickle. Director Anatole Litvak keeps this noir thriller moving as the moments tick by leading up to the time Stanwyck thinks she's a goner. The suspense is pretty nifty. Burt Lancaster plays her patient husband who may or may not have something to do with the set-up and Ed Begley is her no-account father. Put it on a double bill with "Rear Window", another shut-in in peril flick.

"Bigger Than Life" (1956)

One of the more interestingly subversive films of the buttoned-down 1950's. It utilizes a well-worn theme, that underneath the placid surface of squeaky clean suburbia lie messy undercurrents, but in its own unique way. Director Nicholas Ray is playing in the same expressionistic territory as that other dissector of mid-Century mores,  Douglas Sirk, as in his best films of the same period like "All That Heaven Allows" and "Imitation of Life". James Mason is a perfectly ordinary school teacher in a perfectly ordinary suburban small town with the requisite beautiful wife (Barbara Rush) and cute little boy (Christopher Olsen, who also played the iconic 50's tike in Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" ). But Mason starts to suffer from painful 'spells' that incapacitate him, one of those convenient Hollywood maladies that help the plot. When he's diagnosed and given only a year to live the only answer his doctors come up with is a new experimental miracle drug. The catch? It turns him into a nasty, mean, S.O.B, a hundred and eighty degrees from his former self, and to make matters worse, the drug is expensive and it's killing the family finances. This is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde comes to Pleasantville. The story turns from weapy melodrama to tense thriller as  Mason, truly frightening here, torments his poor family. Rush is effective in her noble suffering, does she choose to watch her husband die...or live with a monster? Watch how Ray heightens the mood and symbolism through sets and lighting. Walter Mathau is on hand too as a family friend. This is an underrated find for cineastes.

"Compulsion" (1959)

There have been many plays, roman a clef novels, and movies based on the famous Leopold and Loeb murder case of the 1920's, most notably Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" and Tom Kalin's "Swoon". This version is adapted from Meyer Levin's 1956 book of the same name. It hews pretty closely to the major incidents in the case: two very wealthy college students, devotees of the Nietzschean "superman" philosophy, believe they can pull of the perfect crime; they plan and cold bloodily kill a young boy, but through happenstance and smart police work are found out and brought to trial in what at the time was billed as 'the crime of the century". Their lawyer was the famous Clarence Darrow and a media circus ensued. If you don't know the outcome, the suspense of the courtroom drama is whether the two murders will get the electric chair. Director Richard Fleischer does right by all the actors here. The young and swoon-worthily handsome Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell play the culprits. Dillman brings just the right amount of smarm to his cocky to-the-manor-born half of the duo, while Stockwell is the shyer, introspective one. Of course no telling of the Leopold/Loeb story is complete without a strong undercurrent of gay subtext, and the film is pretty explicit (by late '50s standards) about indicating the strong attraction these two culprits have for each other...and murder. The last third of the piece is the trial itself and Orson Welles (who gets star billing but doesn't show up for over an hour), is quite effective in a subdued world-weary performance for the Darrow role, as is the always stalwart E.G.Marshall as the prosecuting attorney.

"Lust for Life" (1956)

By sheer looks alone Kirk Douglas was born to play the doomed artist Vincent Van Gogh. When you see him with his hair dyed red to match the subject's in this respectful biopic, there's an uncanny resemblance to all those famous self-portraits this tortured soul created. But the performance goes beyond looks. Douglas goes for broke in conveying the zealous passion Van Gogh had for his art, along with his lifelong struggle to overcome insurmountable inner demons. Is the suffering really explained? No. But you do get an informative overview of Van Gogh's life, how he discovered his technique, and how is was inspired by so much of the natural world around him (and don't forget that ear business). Best of all, of course, are all those glorious paintings. Director Vincent Minelli explodes the widescreen with all the luscious colors in Van Gogh's palette. Much of the film was shot in the same locations that Van Gogh recreated. It's fun to see the art vs. the original place. Anthony Quinn won an Oscar as the spirited rake Paul Gauguin who befriends Van Gogh and goads him to go with his gut and paint what he feels. An added bonus is Miklos Rozsa's emotional score.

"My Favorite Brunette" (1947)

By 1947 the film noir genre had firmly taken hold as a type of Hollywood film. The tough talking, big city detective prowling an urban landscape of underworld criminals and femme fatales, trying to solve some sordid crime with too many suspects on hand. So it was inevitable that it was a ripe for parody. What's interesting about this entertaining little film is that the filmic ribbing came so quickly to the nascent genre and it manages to bend the rules but also play by them as well. Bob Hope, sans  his usual screen cohort Bing Crosby, although Der Bingle does make a cameo appearance here, is a frustrated advertising photographer who dreams of being a hard boiled private eye. Without spoiling anything, he gets his wish, but he bumbles his way through the entire proceedings. Everyone in the picture is playing it straight, as if they're in a real noir thriller, including the heavies, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney. Hope plays all the comedy to himself, in sotto voce asides so that only we the audience hear his thoughts. It's a running stream of consciousness gag that was later stolen by Woody Allen in his nervous comedies to great effect. Luscious and lovely Dorothy Lamour is on hand as the wealthy widow who hires Hope to find her missing husband. She's just window dressing, but then so many noir females were just that. At least she's game and has fun with the part. If you like genre-bending fare do put it on your list.

"Fahrenheit 451" (1966)

One of the strangest pairings of director and movie genre ever attempted. Francois Truffaut was one of the seminal creators of the French New Wave, a style of filmmaking noted for it's looser, grittier, less formalistic approach to storytelling. It's themes were contemporary and dealt with current social issues. So what was he doing helming an adaptation of a popular science-fiction novel set in a dystopian future? Well, the answer was probably (and primarily) Truffaut's love of the written word and/or art, and, secondarily, the dangers of totalitarian governments. It's a frightening future where books are banned, not just censored. You can't read them, own them, write them. Oskar Werner is a "fireman" working for the state. It's his job to ferret out and extinguish any books owned by lawbreakers. When he meets a lovely girl on the monorail (Julie Christie) who we find out is part of an Underground devoted to saving and preserving books, his sentiments begin to change. But if his superiors find out he's fried, pun intended. The movie has strange rhythms. It doesn't have the pacing of a typical Hollywood thriller, but the oddly antiseptic production design of this paranoid world somehow fits. It's got a Flash Gordon-meets-Mod-Sixties vibe. Werner and Truffaut famously hated each other through this production but the actor's Teutonic accent works to heighten the Nazi-like proceedings. In a another odd touch, Christie plays a dual role as Werner's mind-numbed wife who spends her days in a drug induced torpor watching her giant flat-screen TV (a future prediction the art directors got right). This is one of those quirky movie curios that's definitely worth the time, if only for the haunting and beautiful ending, justifiably famous, that only an artist like Truffaut could pull off.