The standard take on the cinema of 1946 is that it massively reflects post-war disillusionment. This was one of the peak years of what is now called film noir: The Big Sleep, Detour, Gilda, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killers, and other hardboiled crime melodramas of the year are famous examples of the noir style and mood.

Film noir is an alluring but inadequate concept. In practice, its stylistic options and attitudes never remained pinned to one genre, but spilled over into all of them, even the brightly colored musical Americana of Margie, a period piece by silent-movie naturalist Henry King. The year's major westerns—My Darling Clementine, Canyon Passage, and Duel in the Sun—are filled with doubt about society and introduce a new anxiety into the western. Even Paisan and Shoeshine share visual and thematic concerns with America's "dark cinema," and yet neorealism was originally seen as oppositional to noir's studio-dependent techniques. If all the movies represented here are "noir" in some way, what good is it as a descriptive term?

The important thing, as usual, is not to get so lost in generalities about overarching trends that one fails to distinguish between films. Even though It's a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death both begin in outer space and involve angels and attempted suicide, and even though Diary of a Chambermaid and Cluny Brown are both set in the past and feature independent young women working as maids in the homes of aristocrats, each of these films must find its own place within the secret history.

Something about getting back to work after the war must have been exhilarating. Even the overrated movies of 1946 are worthwhile. One, strangely enough, is brilliant.

The ten best

1. The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, USA)

Humphrey Bogart, as detective Philip Marlowe, and Lauren Bacall, as the divorced daughter of his client, stride confidently through this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's decadent murder book. Even when they're angry, they're happy, in this romantic comedy for a brutal world. Love never speaks its name here. That would blow the whole thing. Instead, Hawks proposes a series of oddball matches between desperate characters like rubber-headed, dead-eyed Louis Jean Heydt's Joe Brody and elbowy, angular Sonia Darrin's Agnes. Someone's always in danger of getting blown away when one of these couplings untangles. Usually, it happens after a scene so loose and funny you never noticed how tense everything was getting until somebody took a bullet. From the raw material of a Los Angeles filled with orchids, chinoiserie, old books, rain, and night, Hawks goes in the opposite direction most filmmakers would take this stuff: into pure joy.

2. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, USA)

Made up of similar elements, Notorious is still the opposite of The Big Sleep. Cary Grant is an American spy. Ingrid Bergman is a wealthy, dissolute party girl and reluctant double agent. Drunk driving in Miami and hushed conversations on park benches in Rio reveal a darker world than Hawks's. In this film, the couple starts to choke on evil, and Hitchcock implies this may be all that's possible for two people in love. The director's detached, wounded view of humanity is at its most threatening and perverse here. Grant and Bergman keep hurting each other on purpose, with the excuse that there's still a few Nazis that the system they're bound to has to get rid of. As they do it, the movie becomes increasingly obsessed with bottles, cups, glasses, and the back of Cary Grant's head.

3. Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, USA)

Hawks and Hitchcock had great means at thier disposal: hugely magnetic actors, highly polished scripts, lots of time. Edgar Ulmer had nothing, except utter abjection. Detour is his masterpiece. From the poverty of week-long shooting schedules and unglamorous performers, he produced an unremittingly bleak film that's a triumph at every level. Tom Neal, an actor as doomed as the character he plays, takes it on the lam and meets Ann Savage, cinema's most virulent harpy fatale. These two are so beyond hope that when they go at it the atmosphere around them becomes like the air in an abandoned refrigerator. Whenever Neal, who's constantly trying to get away from Savage anyway, reaches out to her, she knocks him cold with lines like, "Yeah well, your philosophy stinks, pal!" It's hard to imagine aplace farther away from the wit and wisecracks and loving looks of Bogart and Bacall. This is the cinema reduced to its minimum: light and shadow on bare walls, bleak dialogue, underwritten situations, dispirited consciousness.

4. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, USA)

Ford's emotionally complex retelling of the gunfight at the O. K. Corral features Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and Victor Mature as Doc Holliday. Fonda's Earp is one of the prime creations in Ford's cinema. Everything he does is both tossed-off and resonant, whether he's playing poker, dancing uncomfortably in a half-built church, or reacting to people smelling the aftershave he's let a barber pour all over him. A lesser actor like Victor Mature could be devastated by Fonda's underplaying, but Ford won't allow it. Mature's tubercular, educated gambler longs for his own death and realizes tragic dignity even helping a drunken traveling actor remember Shakespeare. In this too-often sun-blistered genre, My Darling Clementine's ultra-moody black-and-white photography is perfect. It's a film focussed on the dark hearts at the edges of a burgeoning community.

5. Diary of a Chambermaid (Jean Renoir, USA)

Set in France around the turn of the century, this masterpiece from Renoir's underappreciated Hollywood period stars Paulette Goddard as Celestine, an ambitious maid to a family of weirdo aristocrats. The heroine steers her own course through a world of confusing social hierarchies and obligations, avoiding the temptations posed by other people—including Burgess Meredith in a priceless comic performance as a flower-eating eccentric. Denouncing the hold of the dead past (represented by the family silverware), Renoir comes out unequivocally in favor of Celestine's pride and detachment; in a beautiful scene, he makes her golden hair into a symbol of revolution.

6. Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur, USA)

This neglected gem by the director of Cat People and Out of the Past is overdue for rediscovery. A moody, richly textured portrait of intertwined destinies in an Oregon mining town in the 1850s, the film combines scenic beauty (in Technicolor) with a contemplative, philosophical tone and a mature, psychologically subtle viewpoint on friendship, temptation, and the discontents of civilization. At the center of the story is the loyalty of Dana Andrews's industrious entrepreneur to his weak-willed friend (Brian Donlevy). Also in the cast are Susan Hayward and Hoagy Carmichael (singing "Ole Buttermilk Sky").

7. Utamaro and His Five Women (Utamaro o meguro gonin no onna; Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)

One of the best films ever made about art and artists, and one of Mizoguchi's most direct, most sensuous films. His Utamaro is a passionate explorer, eager to suffer in empathy with the women he portrays. At the film's emotional climax, a geisha confesses to her colleagues that she's killed her lover and his mistress, exhorts Utamaro to protect her image, and goes offscreen to surrender to her fate, leaving Utamaro (who has been handcuffed by the repressive government) gazing after her and exclaiming compulsively, "I want to paint, I want to paint so much"—a supreme expression of joy and despair.

8. Ivan the Terrible Part Two (Ivan grozny; Sergei Eisenstein, USSR)

The continuation of the wacky adventures of Tsar Ivan, his loyal Oprichniki, and the plotting, treacherous Boyars. If you liked 1945's Part One, Part Two is even more extreme: serpentine choreography of furred, bejeweled actors, photographed against palace interiors that simultaneously suggest an impossible decadence and the caves of Lascaux. The cast's stilted, ritualized gestures vividly convey how the obsession with power turns people into frozen images of themselves; the overall effect of the film's exorbitant stylization is both mesmerizing and exhilarating. When the film suddenly switches from black-and-white to red, raging Agfacolor for a darkly ironic banquet scene, it outdoes itself in hallucinatory splendor.

9. Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, USA)

The one great comedy about plumbing. Charles Boyer, as exiled Czech writer Prof. Adam Belinski, and Jennifer Jones, as Cluny, an amateur plumber reduced to the status of chambermaid, are natural born aristocrats who unfortunately have to live off merely titled ones. Brown and Belinski can't be bothered picking crumbs out of the beds of the rich or watching them sit on horses. Not for long, anyway, as they have pipes to fix and books to write. The setting is England in 1938, but the film's cheeriness reflects a Lubitsch who'd already made the anti-Nazi To Be or Not to Be. This is a film where the war is over, and Lubitsch can get get on with taking apart the limiting self-image of every class, be it serving, shopkeeping, or estate-owning.

10. Paisan (Paisà; Roberto Rossellini, Italy)

Six stories about encounters between Italians and Americans during the last months of World War Two. Their attempts to communicate with each other are constantly frustrated by language and cultural barriers but most of all by the psychological devastation of war. A key example of the neorealist aesthetic, Paisan feels like it was made in great haste, in an effort to record the imprints of war on landscape and mind before they fade in the optimism of reconstruction. The sixth and last story is one of the most emotionally powerful experiences in all cinema: a work of total abstraction, mystery, horror, and despair, suffused in an unrelieved mood of uncertainty and danger, showing a furtive, faceless group of stragglers, abandoned by their countries to suffer the enemy's arbitrary cruelty.

Honorable mention

1. Margie (Henry King, USA)

A heartbreaking film of nostalgic reminiscence, Margie uses Technicolor superbly. Patches of extreme bright color are surrounded by muted shades and darkness. King's tracking and crane shots perfectly evoke the autumn and winter of a hopeful world sliding into Depression and world war. Jeanne Crain plays a hypersensitive teenager and "champion debater" in small-town America 1928. Her emotionality is tamed and normalized so she can become the quiet, resigned wife and mother who looks through her scrapbook at the film's start. Notable also for its unusual use of period music, this semi-musical pretty much defines wistful when Barbara Lawrence and boyfriend Conrad Janis dance on a porch to "A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You," as Margie (Crain), looking on from her room across the way, segues into a lonely "I'll See You in My Dreams."

2. A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)

Like Margie, this movie is a Technicolor masterpiece (with sequences in black-and-white) that's got a lot in common with It's a Wonderful Life. The whole thing is so curious it's hard to describe. David Niven is an RAF flyer who's supposed to die, but doesn't because of a clerical error in heaven. He falls in love with a glowing Kim Hunter, there's a camera obscura, and the whole thing winds up with a trial in heaven and in an operating room. Niven asks Marius Goring, as an extremely fey French aristocrat who was beheaded during the Revolution, where he comes from, and Goring describes this place as "the training center for another world." He might as well be describing the movie itself, a very odd fantasy about life after war. From the directors of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.

3. Cloak and Dagger (Fritz Lang, USA)

Gary Cooper plays a nuclear physicist who goes undercover in Europe during World War II to try to get a brilliant colleague out of the hands of the Nazis. At first glance a minor Lang film, Cloak and Dagger proves on closer inspection to be as stringently designed and enigmatic as any of his icy masterworks. In it, he pursues his obsessions: concealed powers and forms, duplicity and duplication, the architectural unease of passageways and other spaces that people occupy only in transit. In a memorable moment, Cooper, passing through an airport lobby, holds his briefcase over his face to avoid being photographed; ironically, it's this protective maneuver that makes him stand out in the crowd and draws the Nazis' attention to him.

4. Her Sister's Secret (Edgar G. Ulmer, USA)

This rare Ulmer film is a luminous soap opera about the emotional repercussions that ensue when a woman (Nancy Coleman) who gave her out-of-wedlock child to her sister (Margaret Lindsay) to raise decides she wants to acknowledge the child as her own. Working with a higher budget and a better script than usual, while, as usual, refusing to apologize for such limitations as they still impose, the director of Detour fashions an engrossing, visually fluid melodrama comparable to the best of John M. Stahl or Douglas Sirk (directors of, respectively, the originals and remakes of Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life).

5. Gilda (Charles Vidor, USA)

Twisting Hollywood conventions about sex, morality, and psychology, Charles Vidor creates an extreme, astonishing film, a work ofpurest artifice. Glenn Ford plays a small-time drifter who winds up in Buenos Aires as the loyal right-hand man of suave casino owner George Macready. After Macready apparently dies, Ford takes over his business; he also takes over his wife (Rita Hayworth), and makes it his mission to punish her for her supposed promiscuity while she was married to Macready. Thematically similar in different ways to To Have and Have Not, Notorious, and The Lady from Shanghai, Gilda lacks the heart, integrity, and intensity of any of those films, substituting dense texture, exotic hints of perversion, and highly wrought, brilliant surfaces. The film features Hayworth in her best remembered role (singing "Put the Blame on Mame") and has a good, low-key performance by Ford, but it's quietly, professionally stolen by Macready, Joseph Calleia, and Steven Geray.

6. So Dark the Night (Joseph H. Lewis, USA)

Steven Geray, a short, round-faced actor who was a self-effacing presence in small parts in many films (including Gilda), has the lead for once, as a famous Paris detective who falls in love with a younger woman while on vacation in the country. When she and her lover are found murdered, Geray takes over the investigation with aplomb, but soon finds himself stumped for the first time in his career. Lewis's visual style is at its most abstract, mannered, and obsessive in this film, which ends with one of the most original hallucination sequences in cinema.

7. Shadows over Chinatown (Terry Morse, USA)

A Charlie Chan entry from Monogram Pictures, this is one of the rare B movies to achieve the involuntary surrealism that is sometimes said, wrongly, to have flourished at this level of production. Here Terry Morse (British Intelligence, the American sequences of Godzilla) captures the essence of Monogram: the minimal, unchanging urban landscape; the desperate, repetitive plotting; standardized characters who float from movie to movie. The police work in this film is so slipshod that the viewer starts to think that the police are only pretending to be police and are actually part of some nefarious conspiracy. This was Sidney Toler's 20th go-round as Chan, and his palpable impatience with the role and with the other actors is strangely endearing. Nobody likes this film.

Most wanted

1. Women's Victory (Josei no shori; Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)

It's universally agreed that Mizoguchi is one of the handful of true cinematic greats, so if our culture is going to act like it actually cares about the cinema, then all his surviving films should be available in some form. If even one Faulkner (a screenwriter on The Big Sleep) novel were unavailable in bookstores and libraries, people who care about literature would be outraged. Not so with movies, proving that they're still not considered as important as the other arts and don't warrant the most basic consideration. In this film, one of Mizoguchi's contemporary-set social problem melodramas, a woman lawyer defends a former schoolmate against charges of infanticide. It ends before a verdict is reached. It sounds like a startling exploration of Mizoguchi's constant theme, the role of women in a society that won't stop oppressing them. Do you like this description? It's as close as you're likely to get to Women's Victory.

2. A Scandal in Paris (Douglas Sirk, USA)

The life of Vidocq (George Sanders), a crook who became head of the French police in the 19th century. "In this film I tried to go beyond realism in the way I presented the story," says Sirk. "It became almost surrealist. In the manner of the American surrealists, not the French ones. The picture was not very successful. This was presumably because I adopted a position which brought out the irony, and that doesn't go down well at all with an American audience.... They want a cut and dried stance, for or against." Akim Tamiroff co-stars.

3. Rendezvous with Annie (Allan Dwan, USA)

In this service comedy, Eddie (Green Acres) Albert plays a soldier who goes AWOL to secretly spend time with his wife. He gets back to his base without anyone knowing he ever left, but the wife is soon with child. What kind of hijinks ensue we can only imagine, but William (I Love Lucy) Frawley appears to be involved. The first movie Dwan made on a long-term contract for Republic, a third-tier studio, is highly regarded by the few who've seen it. Does Dwan, the laughing Buddha of genre cinema, handle it with his usual unblinking assurance?

4. The Black Eagle (Aquila nera; Riccardo Freda, Italy)

While a teenager, Freda saw the Rudolph Valentino swashbuckler The Eagle "at least twenty times.... So quite naturally, I wanted to remake it. But mine is different.... I've always watched films for escape, not for invention or camera movements. It's my childhood memories that pushed me to make films, not directors.... I directed the film that I would have liked to see as a spectator in the movie theaters." All but forgotten today, this early work by a master of melodramatic style was a huge popular success on its release. Rossano Brazzi stars, and a 19-year-old Gina Lollobrigida makes her debut in a small part.

Overrated

1. The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, USA)

This renowned film about returning veterans and their families was the prototypical post-war "male weepie." Although it would take a callous viewer indeed not to be moved by its emotional highpoints, the movie's overall impression is tepid. It has its virtues: the cast (Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright) is excellent; and if triple-Oscar-winner Wyler's punctilious, bland direction can be called a style, Best Years shows the style at its peak. The enduring attraction of the film, however, is Gregg Toland's inventive, beautifully nuanced black-and-white photography.

2. Great Expectations (David Lean, UK)

David Lean, in his Classics Illustrated mode, adapts the Dickens novel. It's the kind of "quality" cinema in which soon after it's made only the insecure remain interested. In other words, it's Spielbergian. Lean feverishly attends to every turn in the story, and all one can ask is, why? Unlike Lean's later films (Lawrence of Arabia is enough of an example), it has one thing in its favor: for about an hour, it's desperately afraid of being dull. Finlay Currie, as an escaped convict hiding out in a graveyard on the marshes, and cinematographer Guy Green, providing the film with shimmering black-and-white, get things off to a good start, but to no avail.

3. Shoeshine (Sciuscià; Vittorio De Sica, Italy)

A Warner Brothers juvenile crime drama posing as neorealism, and therefore Important Art. After Rossellini kicked off what looked like a whole new way of making films with Rome Open City in 1945, De Sica and his screenwriters dropped the ball with this dismal piece of sentimentality that's still fooling people who haven't seen Angels with Dirty Faces or Each Dawn I Die. Despite the location shooting amidst Italy's post-war rubble and the genuineness of the imprisoned urchins, it still comes off phony.

4. The Killers (Robert Siodmak, USA)

Whatever that uncertain category film noir is supposed to consist of, this film has it: repetitive high-key lighting, pretty black-and-white photography, unearned fatalism, pseudo-snappy wisecracks, a dumb loser (Burt Lancaster in his debut), a vacuous femme fatale (Ava Gardner), an Everyman investigator (Edmond O'Brien). It's not so bad, really, but it's not enough. Siodmak has made excellent films along these lines; 1949's Criss Cross is one of them. The Killers is just as pat as Great Expectations. This material would have to wait until Don Siegel got ahold of it in 1964, stocked it with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, and Ronald Reagan (his last film), and turned it into a searing, color knockout.

5. Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, William Dieterle, Josef von Sternberg, et al, USA)

Overlong and overblown in the typical manner of producer David O. Selznick, and a victim of his penchant for replacing directors, this western's built around a love triangle (Jennifer Jones struggling against her mother's tainted blood, Joseph Cotten and Gregory Peck as good and bad brothers) that never becomes fully convincing. But main director Vidor gives it, in passages, great visual strength, and the convulsive final scene is justly famous.

Check out more from Club Havana's Secret History of Cinema:

Introduction;

1939;

1953;

1968;

1976;

1983; and

1994

Chris Fujiwara and A. S. Hamrah are Club Havana Productions.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Media Zone of the Web site Tripod.