When a bus collision claims the life of a dear friend's daughter, chemist John Mills is guilt-ridden and attempts suicide. Later, fellow boarding-house resident Molly (Kay Walsh) is murdered, and Mills fears he might be a psychotic killer. "Very much in the Hitchcock/Lang tradition"—William K. Everson. (Roy Baker, 1947, 35 mm, 110 minutes)

Normally mild-mannered Newcastle barber Ralph Richardson is pulled into a seamy blackmail scheme after one false move. On location in northeast England, On the Night of the Fire's noir ambience is aided by Gunther Krampf's expressionistic lighting and a climactic multi-alarm blaze. (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1939, 35 mm, 94 minutes)

Ex-convict Shorty (Emlyn Williams) finds his former mistress murdered. Then, a long-distance lorry driver and a hostess at the Palais de Danse try to help. Filled with lively lowlife characters, They Drive by Night is "an enormously sympathetic movie that time forgot"—Elliott Stein. (Arthur Woods, 1938, 35 mm, 84 minutes)

Small-time club owner Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) concocts a scheme to run London's wrestling rackets—but instead runs headlong into the big-time bosses. With masterful location shooting from the docks of the East End to Trafalgar, Night and the City makes London a "dark, sad city of the imagination"—Colin McArthur. (Jules Dassin, 1950, 35 mm, 95 minutes)

John Dankworth's jazz score and Robert Krasker's dusky images emphasize an edgy mood in Joseph Losey's gangland thriller, based loosely on the life of mobster Albert Dimes. "A controversial exposé of prison life and the underworld"—Pacific Film Archive. (Joseph Losey, 1960, 35 mm, 97 minutes)

Nuclear scientist Barry Jones threatens to blow up London by noon on Sunday unless Britain is willing to stop all atomic weapons research; his motive, he claims, is the long-term good of mankind. With help from a superb supporting cast, including a family of boarding-house cats, the Boulting brothers forged a strangely prescient picture of a contemporary terror. (John and Roy Boulting, 1950, 35 mm, 94 minutes)

On the lam after killing his wife, James Mason accepts a lift from novelist Pamela Kellino. A bond between the two begins to develop—though Mason might just be material for her next book. I Met a Murderer, wrote James Agee, "is graceful, gallant, resourceful…and better than most studio production." (Roy Kellino, 1939, 35 mm, 79 minutes)

In The Upturned Glass brain surgeon James Mason cures a young woman's blindness, then falls in love with her mother. When the mother is pronounced dead from a fall, Mason starts probing. (Lawrence Huntington, 1947, 35 mm, 90 minutes)

In a tawdry seaside town, as day-trippers dance to the bands on the pier and local folk pack the tearooms, Kolly Kibber keeps an eye open for Pinkie (Richard Attenborough), the razor-wielding head of a racecourse gang. Graham Greene's script of the Boulting brothers' adaptation of his own novel proves, in true noir fashion, "there are no heroes, only those who have been tainted by the darkness"—Cullen Gallagher. (John and Roy Boulting, 1947, 35 mm, 92 minutes)

Tough-as-nails truckers Stanley Baker and Patrick McGoohan face off—in and out of their lorries—while working for a shifty gravel-transport firm in the wilds of rural West Sussex. For blacklisted ex-Hollywood writer/director Enfield, Hell Drivers was the seventh production following a self-imposed exile in England. (Cy Enfield, 1957, 35 mm, 108 minutes)