Saturday, May 2, 2009

Supplemental List of the Truly Obscure

[Finally, after much teasing, the big list. "Truly Obscure" proved to be correct; more than 75% of the titles were new to the hard-core noir aficionados at The Blackboard. That was a wee bit gratifying!]

Anatomy of a Psycho (Boris Petroff, 1961)
Blueprint for Robbery (Jerry Hopper, 1961)
Code of Silence (Mel Welles, 1960)
The Counterfeit Killer (Joseph Lejtes, 1968)
Counterplot (Kurt Neumann, 1959)
Dead to the World (Nicholas Webster, 1961)
The Desert Raven (Alan S. Lee, 1965)
Fallguy (Donn Herling, 1962)
The Fat Black Pussycat (Harold Lea, 1963)
FBI Code 98 (Leslie H. Martinson, 1963)
Four for the Morgue (John Sledge, 1963)
The Glass Cage (Antonio Santean, 1964)
The Gunner (AKA Judy) (David W. Hanson/George Meadows, 1970)
Hong Kong Affair (Paul F. Heard, 1958)
The Invisible Avenger (John Sledge, 1958)
The Jailbreakers (Alexander Grasshoff, 1961)
Johnny Gunman (Art Ford, 1957)
Morals Squad (Barry Mahon, 1960)
The Moving Finger (Larry Moyer, 1963)
Murder in Villa Capri (Otto Simetti, 1955)
The Naked Road (William Martin, 1959)
Nightmare in the Sun (John Derek/Marc Lawrence, 1965)
Nine Miles to Noon (Herbert J. Leder, 1963)
The Pick-Up (Lee Frost, 1968)
The Playground (Richard Hilliard, 1965)
Rat Fink (James Landis, 1965)
The Right Hand of the Devil (Aram Katcher, 1963)
Scream of the Butterfly (AKA The Passion Kit) (Eber Lobato, 1965)
The Silent Witness (Ken Kennedy, 1962)
So Lovely…So Deadly (Will Kohler, 1957)
Stakeout! (James Landis, 1962)
Stark Fear (Ned Hockman, 1962)
Stranded (Juleen Compton, 1965)
Street of Darkness (Robert G. Walker, 1958)
Strike Me Deadly (Ted V. Mikels, 1963)
Third of a Man (Robert Lewin, 1962)
Three for Jamie Dawn (Thomas Carr, 1956)
20,000 Eyes (Jack Leewood, 1961)
Violent Women (Barry Mahon, 1960)
Walk with the Damned (James H. Russell, 1962)
The Yellow Canary (Buzz Kulik, 1963)

POSTSCRIPT: I added in a follow-up post: "I feel like I've stumbled onto a interesting little piece of turf. It is true that some of the titles I've put forward blur the line between noir and exploitation; but then, isn't that exactly what actually did happen, that the noir cycle petered out into a kind of noir-ish exploitation before neo-noir took hold some years later? One of the titles on the latest list, Lee Frost's The Pick-Up (1968), is especially interesting in that regard, because although it is clearly a grindhouse 'roughie,' everyone who has looked at it seems to use the word 'noir' (or 'neo-noir,' even) to describe it. That can't be insignificant."