Three Noir Nights
Poverty Row fatalism, a man investigating his own murder, and Fritz Lang at his cruelest — the public domain's noir shelf, start to finish.
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1h 8m Detour
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1h 23m D.O.A.
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1h 43m Scarlet Street
Three films, three ways to lose everything. Start with Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer’s threadbare tragedy about a hitchhiker who can’t stop making the wrong choice. Then D.O.A., where the crime happens before the film starts and the hero spends the whole runtime racing his own death. Finish with Scarlet Street, Fritz Lang’s account of a mild little man who lets one bad decision curdle into several worse ones. All three are in the public domain and all three hold up — this isn’t nostalgia programming, it’s the genre at its leanest and best.