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: Nicolas Roeg
• United Kingdom, 1973
• 

Don’t Look Now is technically a horror movie, but it’s also a technical film, arty and aloof and not at all a genre standard. You could even see Meryl Streep playing the wife, but that would have made an already difficult film intolerable.

Roeg’s off-season Venice is cold and strangely alluring and he casts silence in a leading role. The nerves of the nervous become frayed by seemingly inocuous situations loaded with dread potential and queasy close-ups of minor characters, transforming them into grotesques.

At times Don’t Look Now can be irritating with its distant, dazed moodiness. Despite effective acting, this dispassionate viewpoint prevents us from sympathising with the protagonists John and Laura Baxter as they struggle to deal with the loss of their daughter. Ultimately the distance serves to lessen the impact of the plot’s climax, making viewing the film a chilly and unrewarding experience.

• Director: Harold Becker
• United States, 1989
• 

There are similarities between Sea of Love and Adrian Lyne’s marginally superior Fatal Attraction, in that both feature uniquely edgy female leads and leading men who lack self-control at crucial moments. In both movies, that lack of self-control is vital to the plot, yet only Pacino in Sea of Love is able to turn it into a character asset.

Pacino’s haggard detective has given twenty years’ service, his domestic stability and his sobriety to the police force when he falls for a murder suspect. The movie then plays out a pretty straightforward “is-she-isn’t-she” storyline with a side order of buddy cop congeniality provided by the ever-reliable John Goodman.

Whilst Ellen Barkin’s Helen cannot compete with the unnerving excellence of Glenn Close’s bunny boiler Alex Forrest - a true movie original - she does bring a streetwise roughness to the relationship which rubs up well against the detective’s barely hidden vulnerability.