Film Noir in the Public Domain

American copyright once required renewal after twenty-eight years. Studios renewed their prestige pictures; the small companies that made B-pictures on six-day schedules often did not, and many of their films — some of them now regarded as masterpieces — fell into the public domain. Film noir was largely a B-picture genre, which is why the Internet Archive holds so much of it.

Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945), shot for the Producers Releasing Corporation in less than two weeks, is the purest example: a hitch-hiker, a wrong woman and a fate that closes like a trap. It is on the National Film Registry, as is Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker (1953), the first noir directed by a woman. Ulmer's Bluebeard (1944) with John Carradine is here as a prelude.

Big-studio orphans follow. Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945), with Edward G. Robinson as a cashier destroyed by Joan Bennett, was never renewed and lapsed; Orson Welles's The Stranger (1946), Lewis Milestone's The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) with Barbara Stanwyck, and Delmer Daves's The Red House (1947) are in the same position. Fear in the Night (1947), from a Cornell Woolrich story, and The Amazing Mr. X (1948), photographed by John Alton, show how much style a small budget could buy.

The late-forties independents are the core: He Walked by Night (1948), the semi-documentary manhunt that inspired Dragnet; Impact and Jigsaw (both 1949); Trapped (1949), a Treasury-agent thriller by Richard Fleischer; Too Late for Tears (1949) with Lizabeth Scott; Quicksand (1950) with Mickey Rooney; Woman on the Run (1950), rediscovered and restored in 2016; The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950), and Kansas City Confidential (1952), whose heist plot has been borrowed ever since.

The Reel ends in the fifties: Lupino's The Bigamist (1953), Suddenly (1954) with Frank Sinatra as a presidential assassin, and Please Murder Me (1956) with Angela Lansbury. Because these are unrenewed U.S. films rather than government works, the sources vary in quality; where a restored copy exists on the Archive, Popcorn links to it.