5 Unusual Film Noir Classics

In 1991, Jean-Luc Godard wrote in retrospect, "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl," but filmmakers have been taking that sentiment to heart for decades: Those two dangerous details have served as the core ingredients of film noir since the birth of the genre during the early days of World War II, when the world seemed to fall into a moral tailspin.

Most noir fans will agree about its best specimens, but many keep a special place in their hearts for a handful of unusual suspects -- movies that have an offbeat twist or unique style of some kind or another. Here are the quirky ones:

The Big Clock

Australian-born writer/director James Farrow, actress Mia Farrow's father, had only a handful of decent films (including Hondo, with John Wayne, and the jungle rescue adventure Five Came Back, featuring a starlet named Lucille Ball), but he scored big with this gorgeously designed and photographed and often-lighthearted film from 1948.

Set largely in the stylish skyscraper that constitutes the empire of imperious publishing magnate Earl Janoth, The Big Clock stars the urbane Ray Milland (perhaps best known for Alfred Hitchock's Dial M for Murder) as a crime-magazine editor tasked with getting the scoop on a murderer's identity. But for convoluted reasons I'll let you discover for yourself, he simultaneously finds himself distracted by his efforts to save his own neck.

Farrow's Hitchcockian flair and a crackerjack cast -- including Maureen O'Sullivan (a.k.a. Mrs. John Farrow) as the workaholic editor's long-suffering wife, Elsa Lanchester (a.k.a. Mrs. Charles Laughton) as a dotty artist, and Harry Morgan as a tight-lipped, pint-sized tough guy -- are icing on a beautiful and cleverly baked confection.

D.O.A.

Forget the 1988 remake ("Forget the remake" is almost invariably a good piece of advice), and check out the 1950 original starring Edmond O'Brien as a small-town businessman on the trail of his own murderer: He's been poisoned, and on the slimmest of clues, he sets out to track down the man responsible for his impending death.

O'Brien, a character actor best known for his work in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Killers, and The Barefoot Contessa (for which he won an Oscar for best supporting actor), was no leading man, but he was perfectly cast as an unremarkable everyman who draws the short stick. Polish-born filmmaker Rudolph Mate, a celebrated cinematographer (The Lady from Shanghai, Gilda, The Pride of the Yankees) whose directorial career was otherwise unremarkable, made the most of a clever premise and, for the genre, an unusually convoluted plot.

Detour

You can't read about director Edgar J. Ulmer nowadays without coming across the words "Poverty Row." Ulmer, born in what is now the Czech Republic, is now inescapably stained with an association with Hollywood's no-budget movie studios, collectively identified by that nickname.

However, despite a career spent mostly working on forgettable movies with titles like Girls in Chains, Babes in Baghdad, and Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, he is revered for three shoestring-budget genre classics: the 1934 horror film The Black Cat (starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff), the 1951 sci-fi flick The Man from Planet X, and this 1945 film, about a down-on-his-luck hitchhiker on the highway to hell (thanks, of course, to a no-good dame). The budget for this 28-day shoot was so bare bones that Ulmer staged his own car in front of the back-projection footage.

The unrelentingly bleak film is peppered with voiceover lines like "That's life. Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you." (Another gem: After a character commits a murder, another person asks him, "What'd you do, kiss him with a wrench?") But film noir is all about the bleak.

Gun Crazy

This delightfully lurid 1950 film about a gun-obsessed loser who falls for a blonde sideshow sharpshooter stars John Dall, otherwise best known for his role as one of two young men who carry out the perfect crime (but are brought down by their own hubris, with a little help from James Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.

Peggy Cummins, whose only two well-known films are this and Jacque Tourneur's chilling Night of the Demon, is captivating in her sexually charged role as femme fatale Annie Laurie Starr, and Dall is gripping as a tightly wound war veteran wrapped around her finger and in way over his head. The psychosexual undercurrent makes for a giddy viewing experience.

Kiss Me Deadly

Robert Aldrich wrangled complete creative control over this offbeat 1955 private-eye flick loosely based on a Mickey Spillane novel, and we are the beneficiaries of his obduracy. Ralph Meeker revels in the role of brutal, amoral gumshoe Mike Hammer, who's after a mysterious box despite the fact that everybody else trying to get a hold of it ends up dead. (The FBI's also after it, he reasons, so it's gotta be worth something.)

Hammer's secretary Velda, memorably played by otherwise undistinguished actress Maxine Cooper in her film debut, gets the best line among many great lines: "First, you find a little thread, the little thread leads you to a string, and the string leads you to a rope, and from the rope you hang by the neck."

Aldrich, known for tough-guy fare like Vera Cruz and The Dirty Dozen, ruffled the feathers of the 1950s morality police with this seamy mystery punctuated by an ending unlike any other.