Although film noir has long been a source of fascination for film scholars, historians and aficionados of studio-era Hollywood cinema, the majority of writing on the genre remains focused on the same limited canon of well known titles—The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past, The Killers, etc. And yet, unlike other dominant studio genres such as the musical or the Western, some of the most revealing examples of film noir lie not in the well-worn center, but rather at the further margins of the genre itself, in the lesser known and forgotten gems we have unearthed for this series.

While the selected films display film noir's signature chiaroscuro style and explore classic noir themes—cruel fatalism, the femme fatale, brutal violence—they also offer some of the more unexpected and inventive variations on noir concepts, revealing subtleties and complexity of the genre and leading us down dark, lonely streets where we’ve never been before.