Orson Welles always considered The Stranger (1946) merely a means to an end. Prevented from directing a feature for four years because of his reputation for profligacy, Welles agreed to make the story of a war criminal hiding in rural Connecticut in order to prove to the studio suits that he could be entrusted with a more personal project. Despite the fact its screenplay was Oscar nominated and it became one of his few commercial successes, Welles disowned the project. Lamenting the removal of a 30-minute, self-scripted opening sequence, he grumbled: `It is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture. I did it to prove I could put out a movie as well as anyone else.'

For all the protestations, this is a stylistically accomplished film noir that overcomes the shortcomings of its occasionally clumsy storyline through the conviction of the cast and the brooding intensity of Russell Metty's monochrome imagery. Edward G. Robinson is serviceable as the pipe-smoking government agent gambling that convicted Nazi Konstantin Shayne will lead him to the mystery strategist who planned the Holocaust. But Welles dominates the action, as the genocidal monster masquerading as a schoolteacher. He's particularly chilling while attempting to hide a body in the woods while his students are conducting a paper chase nearby and as he seethingly espouses his extremist views during a dinner party. But he's less persuasive wooing judge Philip Merivale's daughter, Loretta Young, and her simpering acceptance of his good character feels similarly strained.

Yet, coming just months after the cessation of hostilities, this was an audaciously contentious subject, especially as Washington was actively rehabilitating Nazis whose talents could serve the national interest. Moreover, Welles and Metty make exceptional use of Expressionist shadow and angle to generate a disconcerting sense of menace within their cosy, small-town setting. Consequently, this maligned thriller finally deserves to be bracketed with Alfred Hitchcock's superior fugitive fascist saga of the same year, Notorious.

Totalitarianism was also the theme of Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947), in which sadistic prison guard Hume Cronyn takes time out from tyrannising his charges to listen to Wagner. Determined to succeed warden Roman Bohnen, he sets out to undermine his authority and employs a network of stool pigeons to keep tabs on troublesome inmates like Burt Lancaster, who is about to emerge from solitary after having a shiv planted on him by James O'Rear. But after O'Rear pays a painful price for his perfidy in the laundry room, Cronyn imposes an even stricter regime that prompts top dog Charles Bickford to conspire with Lancaster in a mass breakout.

Scripted by Richard Brooks to both expose and exploit conditions within the US penal system, this is less of a reformist tract than Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). Yet it still paints an uncompromising picture of inhumane punishments like the drainpipe and the savagery of the violence meted out by guards and cons alike. Moreover, with William Daniels's camera reinforcing the claustrophobia of John DeCuir's sets, it powerfully conveys the soul-destroying ennui of incarceration.

But Dassin is too acutely aware of the need to entertain a mainstream audience. Consequently, he frequently meanders into melodrama, as Lancaster and cellmates John Hoyt, Whit Bissell and Howard Duff respectively reminisce about the women in their lives: Ann Blyth, Anita Colby, Ella Raines and Yvonne De Carlo. Such excursions release the pent-up tensions within Cell R17, as do the humanist musings of alcoholic doctor Art Smith, who is as much a prisoner of the system as his patients.

The reprisals exacted upon O'Rear and Jeff Corey are menacingly staged, while the climactic bid for freedom throbs with reckless desperation. But this always seems more inspired by Cagney prison pictures than life, unlike the minimalist-realist insights into escape ritual that would be produced in France during the next decade by Robert Bresson and Jacques Becker. Yet Dassin would borrow from another serie noire staple, the policier or police procedural, for his next noir venture, The Naked City (1948).

On just another New York morning, Lieutenant Barry Fitzgerald and assistant Don Taylor are confronted with two homicides. Nothing seems to link the drunk fished out of the Hudson River and the model found in her bathtub by her maid. But, as the pair delve further, they discover that the dead woman was a jewel thief involved with doctor House Jameson, playboy Howard Duff and his minder, Ted De Corsia, and girlfriend, Dorothy Hart. The investigation culminates in a chase through the tenements of the Lower East Side and a plunge from the Brooklyn Bridge. But this is more a study in painstaking forensics and laborious leg work than intuitive deduction and crash-bang action.

William Daniels won an Academy Award for his photography, which combines candid footage snatched on the city streets and meticulous compositions designed to contrast everyday realism with the psychological state of the suspects. The aura of authenticity is somewhat undermined by Fitzgerald's tendency to overplay, while Albert Maltz's otherwise taut script doesn't always successfully integrate the episodes from Taylor's home life. But the oppressive mood of a postwar world ill at ease with itself pervades proceedings that are driven by producer Mark Hellinger's stentorian narration, which climaxes with the line that would become famous through the spin-off TV series: `There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.'

The same sense of cynicism imbues Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife (1955). However, he consciously eschewed realism by confining the tale of a Hollywood star's bid to salvage his integrity to the setting delineated in Clifford Odets's Broadway play. Thus, Aldrich was able to satirise the artifice and pretensions of the studio system, while also exposing its ruthlessness and venality. Unsurprisingly, however, none of the majors wanted to finance such a caustic exposé and Aldrich had to shoot it independently in just 16 days and release it through United Artists.

It wasn't well received and failed to secure the cult following that would attach itself to Aldrich's 1962 exercise in Grand Guignol, What Ever Happend to Baby Jane? But even though Jack Palance lacks the finesse that John Garfield undoubtedly brought to the original stage production, this is still a lacerating snapshot of Tinseltown aesthetics and morality at the very time when the patina of the Golden Age was beginning to look rather scuffed and shabby.

Coming to the end of a seven-year contract with dictatorial mogul Rod Steiger, Palance's hard-drinking womaniser has promised wife Ida Lupino that he will quit the studio and attempt to patch their crumbling marriage. However, Steiger and unctuous assistant Wendell Corey attempt to blackmail him into signing a new deal by threatening to reveal that he was behind the wheel of the car that killed a young boy and not press agent Paul Langton, who did 10 months for the crime. Moreover, they are prepared to murder garrulous starlet Shelley Winters to stop her from blabbing the truth any time in the future.

Many have criticised Aldrich for failing to open out the action or argotise the dialogue. But they have missed the point that these are characters who have become so inured by their spurious environment that they act as though life itself was a B movie. Only those from outside the charade exhibit genuine emotions and, thus, Aldrich is denouncing not only the phoniness of mainstream American cinema itself, but also the inability of those responsible for it to distinguish between fact and fantasy. Viewed at a time when celebrity peccadilloes are continuously being unearthed by tabloid muckrakers, this may not pack the punch it did half a century ago. But Aldrich was taking quite a risk in disclosing the seedier side of showbiz, especially as so many would have recognised studio bosses Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer in Steiger's portrayal and the scandals involving Clark Gable and Errol Flynn in Palance's evasion of justice.

British thrillers always lacked the edge of their transatlantic counterparts and there's almost a serial feel to the two adventures culled by British International Pictures from the novels of HC `Sapper' McNeile. The British Board of Film Censors took a dim view of The Black Gang and so much of its sting was drawn from Walter Summers's The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1934). Seen today, however, it reeks of jingoistic fervour, as Great War veteran and Black Clan leader Captain Hugh Drummond vows to prevent dastardly foreigners from sabotaging the international peace conference taking place in London. He kidnaps an arms dealer and issues an ultimatum to his bellicose nemesis, Carl Peterson. But his bluff is called and not only is his wife Phyllis abducted, but he is also drugged and driven into a raging river. All looks lost, unless Drummond can escape and his monocled sidekick, Algy Longworth, can rally the Clan.

With Hitler commencing rearmament as soon as he assumed power in January 1933, the arms race was a highly potent theme when this film was first released, especially as Germany had just withdrawn from both the League of Nations and the World Disarmament Conference. Both Sapper and Summers, therefore, make commendable use of contemporary events to reinforce the authenticity and suspense of the action. But, while he invests the title role with an intriguing gravitas, Ralph Richardson is nobody's idea of a troubleshooting hero and his teaming with Ann Todd and Claud Allister as Phyllis and Algy is much less successful than that of villains Francis L. Sullivan and Joyce Kennedy.

What's most striking about this rather creaky escapade, however, is Drummond's disconcertingly Mosleyesque aura and the chilling similarity that his uniformed clansmen bear to the blackshirts of the British Union of Fascists. Thankfully, such sinister undertones had largely disappeared by the time John Lodge starred in Norman Lee's Bulldog Drummond at Bay (1937), although arms traders were still threatening the continent's precarious status quo.

This time, Drummond's adversary is Kalinsky (Hugh Miller), a financier who poses as the chair of the pacifist Key Club, while running guns and scheming to steal the blueprints for a top-secret radio-controlled warplane. His plan depends upon the abduction of a boffin named Caldwell (Richard Bird). But he briefly manages to evade his captors and heave an SOS through Drummond's window and he dices with femme fatale Doris Thompson (Dorothy Mackail) while Algy (Allister again) sets off on Caldwell's trail.

Although John Lodge was often a rather stolid screen presence, he's suitably square-jawed in this brisk adventure. Moreover, he's infinitely more personable than Australian Ron Randell was in Sidney Salkow's 1947 Hollywood remake, which dispensed with the political element to focus on smuggled diamonds. Ian Fleming once confided that Drummond was an influence on James Bond. But he comes across more like Nayland Smith or Richard Hannay in these Appeasement era cases that contrast markedly with Ronald Colman and John Howard's contemporaneous Hollywood outings.

Around the same time, in the Ozark Mountains of the American Midwest, Kate `Ma' Barker and her four sons were conducting a trigger-happy spree that earned them an infamous place in the annals of Depression crime. However, in charting their rise and fall in Bloody Mama (1970), cult king Roger Corman is less interested in historical accuracy than in the hillbilly dysfunctionality that disproved the old maxim that the family that slayed together, stayed together.

Raped by her kinfolk as a girl, Kate (Shelley Winters) despised husband George Barker (Alex Nicol) for his weakness and lavished so much affection upon her offspring that she habitually made them her bed partners. However, the Oedipal Herman (Don Stroud) has designs on taking over the operation, while Lloyd (Robert De Niro) is a junkie, Arthur (Clint Kimbrough) is distracted by raunchy girlfriend Mona Gibson (Diana Varsi) and Freddie (Robert Walden) is dominated by psychotic jailhouse lover, Kevin Dirkman (Bruce Dern). Consequently, the writing is on the wall the moment the gang ships out of Joplin, Missouri and the murder of the swimmer who offered Lloyd some solace (Pamela Dunlap) and the kidnap of millionaire Sam Adams Pendlebury (Pat Hingle) only hasten their demise.

Artfully using John A. Alonzo's photography to recreate the period feel on a shoestring budget, Corman sticks closer to Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) than actuality and, thus, produces an exploitation study in neurosis, avarice and perversion that revels in its post-Code freedom to pile socio-sexual taboos high upon one another. He allow Winters to gnaw on the scenery, but her rootin' tootin' histrionics are key to the satirical subversion of the American Dream encapsulated in her willingness to rob and kill her way to her much-coveted palace. Moreover, they provide a suitable emotional contrast to De Niro's initially touching lakeside encounter with Dunlap and Stroud's conversation with the cunningly paternalistic Hingle. So, while this is never anything more than a B movie, it avoids romaticising its subject and pays heartfelt homage to the Warner gangster cycle that was drawing to a close as the Barkers prepared to shoot it out with the G-Men in January 1935.

Conversely, Bill Duke does view 1950s New York through a rose-tinted lens in his glossy adaptation of Chester Himes's novel, A Rage in Harlem (1991). Consequently, there's a homely feel to a neighbourhood that was often anything but and this idealised setting tips the balance away from the Runyonesque milieu of flamboyant felons towards the cornball romance between fugitive gangster's moll Robin Givens and naive mortician, Forrest Whitaker. Nevertheless, this is still a slick entertainment that's packed with vivid secondary characters and street spirit.

Skipping Natchez, Mississippi with a cache of gold stolen from short-fused lover Badja Dola, Givens fetches up in Harlem in search of a sap to protect her. She latches on to momma's boy Whitaker at the Undertakers' Ball. However, she falls for his doughy charms and when Dola abducts her, the seriously smitten Whitaker is forced to seek the assistance of estranged brother Gregory Hines in order to save her.

Although contemporary reviews raved about the debuting Givens, this is very much an ensemble piece, with Danny Glover, Zakes Mokae and John Toles-Bey respectively impressing as big-city mobster Easy Money, transvestite brothel-keeper Big Kathy and Dola's cackling sidekick. Himes fans will also note the fleeting appearance of police detectives Coffin Ed (Stack Pierce) and Grave Digger (George Wallace), who feature in several of his books. However, in order to keep the large cast gainfully employed, the plot becomes increasingly fragmented and the wit of the opening salvos gives way to unashamed sentiment. There are consistent compensations, however, in the form of Toyomichi Kurita's plush imagery and the period trappings designed by Steven Legler, Nina Ruscio and KC Fox.

Remaining in the 1950s, Desmond Davis takes a stab at Agatha Christie's personal favourite of her own novels in Ordeal By Innocence (1984). The initial plot device is a touch ungainly, but this quickly develops into a satisfyingly dark whodunit that exposes the perils of parenting and the amorality of a superficially respectable decade.

Returning from a two-year expedition to the Arctic (during which time he recovered his lost memory), Donald Sutherland discovers that the young man whose address book he had accidentally retained on giving him a lift has died in prison after being convicted of the murder of his adoptive mother, Faye Dunaway. However, in seeking to clear Billy McColl's name, Sutherland and Scotland Yard inspector Michael Elphick put the real killer on their guard and more lives are lost before the truth finally emerges about the unconventional family that Dunaway had gathered around her at the house once known as Viper's Point.

So much screen Christie has centred around Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, but there is much to relish in non-sleuth outings like this one. Sutherland is somewhat miscast as the misguided doctor desperate to salve a guilty conscience. But the suspects are splendidly dysfunctional: unloved husband Christopher Plummer (who has a crush on secretary Diana Quick); first adoptee Sarah Miles (whose spouse Ian McShane is paralysed by polio); loyal household help Annette Crosbie; headstrong rebel Michael Maloney; drama queen Valerie Whittington; and half-caste Phoebe Nicholls, whose alibi for the night in question seems decidedly shaky.

Complete with a Dave Brubeck jazz score and a fiendish twist, this is a lancinating dissection of middle-class conformity and hypocrisy, and it's to be hoped such other Christies as Sidney Gilliat's Endless Night (1972) and Pascal Thomas's By the Pricking of My Thumbs (2005) will be released in its wake.