Author Archive: Retro

Dir. Ida Lupino. Two young men on vacation of their dreams pick up a psychotic hitch-hiker. Taut and suspenseful thriller.

Noir about manipulative woman.

Noir about reporter investigating murder.

In this complicated police film, a police detective, who still grieves for the child he accidentally shot during a gun fight, finds distraction when a streetwalker approaches him and asks him to help her get out of the dark world in which she is hopelessly mired. Soon the cop finds himself involved with extortion, drugs and a serial killer.

Japanese crime drama

Noir about psychotic killer marrying for money.

A night of tension… a moment of madness… and now he is at the edge of fury.

As a train speeds through the Arizona night, a man posing as a physician holds up the baggage-car crew and escapes with a $500,000 payroll. The fake doctor, Paul Bruckner, leaves the train with his “patient” and the “patient’s wife”, who is really Bruckner’s wife Linda. The insurance company puts its best investigator, Charlie Norman, on the case to work with the railroad’s investigator, Joe Armstrong. The men are friends and Joe is upset that Charlie and his wife, Ruth, will have to postpone their Mexico vacation. Charlie’s concern goes beyond the spoiled vacation as he was the brains behind the holdup, who had fallen in love with Linda several months earlier while investigating a claim Bruckner had filed against his insurance company. At first, Joe is unable to find anything out about the flawlessly timetable planning for the robbery other than what Charlie wants him to find out.

A lawyer wins an acquittal for his client, a woman accused of murder. After the verdict, he finds out that she indeed did commit the murder and manipulated him to win her acquittal. Guilt-ridden, and knowing that she can’t be tried again for the murder, he devises a plan to bring her to justice.