Leslie Brooks

Leslie Brooks plays Claire Cummings, a society columnist who marries rich and keeps moving up, leaving a trail of dead husbands and a psychologist, played by Robert Paige, who realizes too late what she is. A cold-blooded B noir from poverty-row distributor Film Classics, the film runs its femme fatale premise harder than most A-pictures dared: Claire kills without remorse and without a mitigating backstory. Brooks, usually a musical-comedy blonde, is the whole show here, and director Jack Bernhard keeps the melodrama lean and mean. Neglected for decades, it has since been reclaimed as a minor noir classic. It entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.

Noir · Crime · Drama

Linda Darnell plays a young woman who gets herself sent to a women's prison to be near her husband, a Coast Guard officer convicted of a crime he didn't commit. Inside she finds a population of wives and mothers serving time alongside — and sometimes instead of — the men who dragged them into trouble. Edgar Buchanan and Glenda Farrell lead the ensemble. Sidney Salkow directed this Columbia prison-reform drama at the height of the wartime cycle of women's-prison pictures. The film is in the public domain.

Drama · Crime

Fresh out of prison, con man John Muller botches a casino heist and needs to disappear — until he meets Dr. Bartok, a psychiatrist who is his near-exact double, save for a scar on the opposite cheek. Muller kills Bartok, scars himself, and steps into the dead man's life, only to learn the doctor had dangerous secrets of his own. Paul Henreid plays both roles opposite Joan Bennett in this fatalistic Eagle-Lion noir from director Steve Sekely, reissued as The Scar. It is in the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Crime · Noir · Thriller