MikePadgett.com

• Director: Billy Wilder
• United States, 1944
• 

In some life insurance policies, where the policyholder dies in untypical circumstances, the policy pays out double. It’s called double indemnity, and when old Mr Dietrichson gets bumped off in revenge for the heinous crimes of being cranky and middle-aged, it’s made to look like he fell off a moving train.

It follows that the real protagonist in this movie is implausibility. That a housewife with a bad wig could persuade a worldly insurance salesman into helping her to off her husband. That our friendly local salesman would have no qualms about strangling a man with whom he has no beef. That the filmmakers thought a 23-year old actress would pass for the innocent teenage daughter.

Double Indemnity is creatively shot, and as we can expect from Wilder, the script is witty and sharp - indeed, Edward G Robinson positively thrives in his role as the shrewd invesigator Keyes. However, and perhaps this complaint is all too modern, the plot lacks purpose and the characters lack motivation, so the movie is robbed of any real tension.

• Director: Robert Siodmak
• United States, 1946
• 

Insurance investigator Jim Reardon uncovers dark dealings when assigned to the death of Ole ‘Swede’ Andersen. Told in flashback - with more than a pinch of nihilism - from interviews with associates, acquaintances and the police, The Killers is a murky but tense affair, based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

Locked within the confines of those flashbacks, nobody’s innocent. Rather, in true noir fashion, most of the key characters are painted in shades of grey rather than black or white.

Rising stars Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster both impress here, managing to pulp the cardboard psychology of studio cinema. Lancaster does a middleweight portrayal of a boxer-turned-hood, though his Swede is by no means in the same ring as Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront. Gardner meanwhile grabs her audience by keeping her motivation a mystery, leaving viewers guessing about her innocence right to the end.

• Director: Charles Vidor
• United States, 1946
• 

Despite being one of noir’s unlikelier icons, Rita Hayworth seems to have cornered the market in breezy gals with something to hide and in Gilda she does a roaring trade.

For this is indeed a movie of contrasts: it’s a dark, claustrophobic tale played out in a lavish Buenos Aires gambling joint; it’s about the intrigue of secretive Europeans and postwar paranoia in a wide open region that never saw battle. And into this twitchy scene - in which the gamblers watch the joint, the joint watches the monopoly cranks and the police watch everyone - steps all-American Hayworth who, whilst hiding a troubled past, sparkles like a firework that sets the whole thing alight.

If there’s one anomaly, it’s the anti-noir happy ending, in which Glenn Ford’s downbeat Johnny Farrell skips off into the sunset with a suddenly unfettered Gilda. Yet it is just about forgivable, since without their mutual past and their mutual desire, the central tension of the plot - built as it is around these two contrasting characters - could never be so convincing.

• Director: John Huston
• United States, 1941
• 

Huston’s directorial debut is a detective story about the pursuit of the titular avian, a priceless ornament whose origins are engagingly described by Sydney Greenstreet’s portly treasure hunter. The bejewelled bird, lost in history between the Knights of Malta and the Crown of Spain, has popped up once more in Istanbul and by intrigues made its way across the Atlantic, where it now threatens to upstage the entire cast of a Hollywood movie.

Because despite fielding a similar line-up of actors, Maltese lacks the exotic panache of Michael Curtiz’ Casablanca (it also fails to pull off a credible love match). Even so, it does offer smart-mouthed charm in bundles, largely thanks to Bogart’s magnetic turn as private detective Sam Spade.

Both Greenstreet and Peter Lorre as literate crooks make exceptionally good copy, but Mary Astor’s Brigid is rather wooden for modern tastes. As an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s atmospheric novel Maltese qualifies as classic noir but it isn’t really dark enough.