The Maltese falcon 1941 - The first film noir

IMDB Link

IMDB rating: 8,2

Director: John Huston
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre, Barton MacLane, Sydney Greenstreet

"Adapting Dashiell Hammett's novel - and staying as close to the original story as the Production Code allowed - first-time director John Huston turned The Maltese Falcon into a movie often considered the first film noir. In his star-making performance as Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart (taking over from George Raft) embodied the coolly ruthless private eye who recognizes the dark side of humanity, in all its greedy perversity, and who feels its temptations, especially when they are embodied by a woman. While Huston's mostly straightforward visual approach renders The Maltese Falcon an instance of early noir more in its hardboiled attitude than in the chiaroscuro style common to other films noirs, the collection of venal characters, colorfully played by Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook, Jr.; Mary Astor's femme fatale; and Bogart's morally relativistic Spade pointed the way to the mid-1940s flowering of noir in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), and Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). A critical as well as popular success, The Maltese Falcon was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, establishing Huston as a formidable dual talent and Bogart as the archetypal detective antihero who can be as unscrupulous as the next guy but also adheres to his own personal code of honor." - www.allmovie.com

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Mysterious Mr. Moto 1938 - One of the best in the series

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030483/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 7,0

Director: Norman Foster
Main Cast: Peter Lorre, Mary Maguire, Henry Wilcoxon, Erik Rhodes

"Peter Lorre makes his fifth appearance as J. P. Marquand's polite but deadly Japanese sleuth Mr. Moto. This time Moto is called in by Scotland Yard to thwart a vicious gang of international assassins. To infiltrate the gang, Moto poses as a Devil's Island inmate and escapes with one of the killers. The climax takes place at the British Museum, where the mysterious leader of the assassins (the least likely suspect, of course) overplays his hand. The gimmick of having Mr. Moto make his first appearance as an apparent villain works only when the 'Moto' films aren't seen as a group." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/mysterious-mr-moto-v103472

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Mad love 1935 - A great influence on Ciziten Kane

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026663/?ref_=nv_sr_4
IMDB rating: 7,4

Director: Karl Freund
Main Cast: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive

"Produced at the height of Hollywood's 1930s horror obsession, Mad Love (1935) was one of the first psychological horror films, as well as the first American film for German actor Peter Lorre, who accepted the lead after Claude Rains rejected it. Although Lorre shaved his head for the role, the actor did not break from typecasting in his portrayal of a surgeon who enjoys viewing guillotine executions and is becoming mentally unglued over his fixation on a Grand Guignol actress named Orlac (Frances Drake). In the 1970s, film critic Pauline Kael attributed much of Toland's later brilliance in Citizen Kane (1941) to the influence of his earlier work on Mad Love. The first of several film versions of Maurice Renard's The Hands of Orlac, Mad Love was directed by cinematographer Karl Freund. Oddly, Freund never directed again, though he served as cinematographer on many classic films, not the least of which were The Good Earth (1937) and Key Largo (1948)." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/mad-love-v30655/

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http://uploaded.net/file/3357v0gr

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The man who knew too much 1934 - The international breakthrough for Hitchcock

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025452/?ref_=nv_sr_3
IMDB ratings: 6,9

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Main Cast: Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre

"Though Alfred Hitchcock would remake the movie himself in 1956 with a bigger budget, the original 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much is arguably a more historically significant and aesthetically interesting film. It was Hitchcock's first true international hit. Though he wouldn't have a major success in America until The Lady Vanishes, Man and the subsequent The 39 Steps helped establish the director's distinctive style and lay the groundwork for his popularity. Along with Hitchcock's trademark blend of suspense and humor and blurring of the normal and abnormal, the film also features his characteristically grand showpieces, most memorably the recreation of the true-life 'Sidney Street Siege' and the famous Albert Hall scene. The film was also significant as German actor Peter Lorre's first English-language part. Having fled Nazi Germany in 1933, Lorre had to learn his lines phonetically, but he steals the film as the cruel but melancholic bad guy, and his difficulties with English barely show. The actor would go on to give memorable turns in such notable Hollywood productions as Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/the-man-who-knew-too-much-v31107/

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M 1931 - A city is looking for a murderer

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022100/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 8,5

Director: Fritz Lang
Main Cast: Peter Lorre, Ellen Widmann, Inge Landgut, Otto Wernicke

"One of the most distinguished and technically accomplished early sound films, Fritz Lang's M revealed the expressive possibilities for combining sound and visuals, in a metaphorically loaded story about pre-Nazi Germany. Working from the true story of the Dusseldorf child murders, Lang matches a mother's anguished calls for her daughter with images of an empty stairwell and a lost balloon rather than show the killing, while the murderer's obsessive whistling becomes the calling card for his threatening presence. Beyond the use of sound, Lang takes a pessimistic view of German society, using editing to equate the police with the criminals, while Fritz Arno Wagner's fluid cinematography creates a gloomy night world of shadows and paranoid entrapment. Lang's documentary-like attention to the details of the search, combined with the absence of non-diegetic music, matches the stylization with an equally creepy element of realism. The killer may be sick, but the society pursuing him isn't that much better. A worldwide success and a star-maker for Peter Lorre (who is terrifyingly ordinary in the role of the murderer), M influenced movies from those of Orson Welles to the American film noir of the 1940s; Lang himself left Nazi Germany for Hollywood in 1933.
M is revealed as a true classic - a film that shames everything made in its genre since." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/m-v100745

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