This break-through feature from B-master Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy, The Big Combo) serves as the missing link between the Gothic melodramas and thrillers popular in the early 1940s (Rebecca, Dragonwyck, The Uninvited) and the film noirs that followed closely on their heels. Nina Foch plays the title character, a hapless young woman lured to an Old Dark House by the promise of gainful employment only to find herself the prisoner of a family of criminal lunatics. Lewis directs the proceedings like a pulp version of Hitchcock, ably abetted by remarkable cinematographer Burnett Guffey’s use of claustrophobic lighting and expressionist shadows.

The dark romanticism of hard-boiled author David Goodis finds its ideal vehicle in Jacques Tourneur’s underappreciated and rarely screened film. An ad man (Ray) is on the lam for a crime he did not commit, tired of hiding out in the back alley world just off Hollywood Boulevard but too frightened to move. I nevitably, his past comes creeping silently up behind him and as it does, Tourneur leads us on a break neck chase for buried treasure, and away from a pair of ruthless killers. A breathtakingly young and gorgeous Anne Bancroft plays the girl who joins Ray for the ride.