Product Review

Dark Film Mysteries is a robust collection of classic film noir (black film), a genre that became a cinematic staple for American audiences during the mid-1940s through the late-1950s. Viewers were eager to venture into the darker attitude of crime fiction that developed around the Great Depression two decades earlier and finally emerged on film during WWII.

Film noir stories generally developed around suspicious male characters that maintained unsympathetic and doom-filled attitudes that would manifest when they encountered beautiful woman of questionable character (femme fatale). She would use her feminine sexuality to manipulate him into an unsuspecting fall guy generally involving a murder. After the betrayal, the femme fatale would frequently be destroyed as well, often at the cost of the hero s life.

Shot in a low-key black-and-white, gloomy visual style with roots in German Expressionist cinematography, these films showed the dark and callous side of human nature, and were filled with an oppressive atmosphere of pessimism, fatality, and doom that was enhanced with shadowy characters and locations swirling with both moody dialogue and cigarette smoke.

In addition to 10 other film noir classics, included on Dark Film Mysteries is an excellent example of one of the moodiest, blackest thrillers ever made... Fritz Lang's steamy and fatalistic Scarlet Street (1945).