Just watched it, the first one with Edmund O’Brien.
It’s clearly noir.
I don’t remember what point you offered it as exemplifying counter to my definition of noir.
It’s certainly a dark, fatalistic crime drama pervasively peopled by evil types, with a fated, inevitable, dark end.
There are a couple of not so prominent femmes fatales.
Mind you the nagging blonde secretary, no femme anything except an unlikable shrew whom O’Brien finally discovers he loves, drove me nuts: if my fate were to have to marry her I’d have gladly taken that poison. The big final love scene between them is for me a melodramatic low point in what’s otherwise a cracking good film.
The twist in this movie on the usual noir pattern is that the main guy is on the up and up and we see the noir from his perspective as victim rather from the perspective of the poor guy who’s typically corrupted into crime by a bad “dame.”
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