The Thousands

From its mid-20th Century heyday to popular neo-noir incarnations, film noir has proven that deep down we’re all gloomily romantic at heart. Noir maintains its perverse appeal across national borders, budgets and genres, but is ultimately inseparable from its retro, post-war American crime context of bad dames, lonely gumshoes and dark alleys.

This DVD box set is riddled with perversely foxy tales of woe and intrigue, and features an admirable chunk of the Noir canon. **The underrated Ray Milland stars as the chump in THE BIG CLOCK (1948), pursued by fate toward a denouement at the titular big clock, a victory for large props everywhere. THE GLASS KEY (1942), THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942) and THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946) feature the Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake double-act, one of noir’s most famous and seductively doomed pairings. With near-erotic bleakness leaking out of every neon-lit window, these films celebrate noir’s obsession with displaced masculinity and empowered, aggressively shoulder-padded femme fatales. Gritty, sexy and a subversive slap in the face to classical Hollywood, noir is as punk as mainstream American cinema can get.