Try and Get Me! (1950)

Cy Endfield was a fascinating figure in American film. He was discovered by Orson Welles' Mercury Theater for his talent with card tricks, and was allowed on the sets of some of Welles' films. He made short films and wrote scripts, and was involved in a series of "Joe Palooka" films before he made his mark in 1950 with the film noir The Underworld Story, and this movie. Try and Get Me! is a powerful condemnation of mob mentality and a call for kindness and reason, and it was immediately considered Communist propaganda. But Endfield refused to name names and left the country, working out of England for the rest of his career. read more...

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• Anxiety Level ▶ I like my stomach in knots
• Moralistic ▶ Yes please
• Overall Depth ▶ Deep or penetrating

Out of the Past (1947)

Jacques Tourneur directed one of the all-time greatest films noir with Out of the Past, which also gave Robert Mitchum one of his two greatest roles (the other being The Night of the Hunter). read more...

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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Surely one of the most iconic movies of the 1970s, Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon is a grubby, hard-edged example of what that decade had to offer moviegoers. Al Pacino stars as Sonny, who walks into a bank with his partner Sal (John Cazale) in order to rob it. Their third helper panics and leaves, and someone (we never find out who) calls the cops, and before long, we have an all-day, and all-night standoff. (This leads to the much-anthologized clip of Pacino screaming "Attica! Attica!" to the hovering crowds.) Lumet and screenwriter Frank Pierson don't run a precision show; they're less concerned with the details of the robbery than they are with the volatile emotions roiling underneath. One of the things that makes this a groundbreaker is the fact that Sonny is doing the robbery to pay for his husband's sex-change operation; yes, he's gay, and the movie makes no bones about it. Others treat him with fear and suspicion, but Sonny himself knows what he wants. (Chris Sarandon even earned an Oscar nomination as Sonny's husband.) read more...

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• Optimistic ▶ No thanks
• Rules ▶ Rigid or strongly constrained
• Innocence ▶ Seasoned, Savvy, Streetwise
• Overall Depth ▶ Deep or penetrating

In a Lonely Place (1950)

The more I see of Nicholas Ray's work, the more I appreciate his intense, visual treatments of potent emotional themes. One of Ray's best and surprisingly most underrated films has just been released on DVD, In a Lonely Place (1951). Humphrey Bogart plays a Hollywood screenwriter, Dixon Steele, who invites a coat check girl home to tell him the plot of a book he's too lazy to read. read more...

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• Anxiety Level ▶ I like my stomach in knots
• Innocence ▶ Seasoned, Savvy, Streetwise

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled detective The Continental Op made his fiction debut in 1929, and the more famous Sam Spade followed in 1930. Raymond Chandler followed in 1939 with the debut of Philip Marlowe. Movie versions of these were made throughout the 1940s. In 1947, another hard-boiled detective hit the scene, in a book called I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane. Private eye Mike Hammer wasn't like the others; he was tougher, greedier, more lowdown, maybe not as bright... in a word, he was more primal. He struck a chord with readers and the Hammer books outsold their predecessors by huge amounts. read more...

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• Optimistic ▶ No thanks
• Boldness ▶ Bold, aggressive, unrepressed, cathartic or expressive actions
• Innocence ▶ Seasoned, Savvy, Streetwise