Two by Anthony Mann: Desperate (1947) and The Tall Target (1951)

Anthony Mann is a director best known for the series of extraordinary Westerns he made with James Stewart in the fifties, but he also made some impressive films noirs before that and some other interesting films along the way. 

The Tall Target (1951) was made just after Mann had made his first Western, Winchester '73.  It takes place almost exclusively on a train from New York to Washington just after Lincoln's election and before his inauguration. One may be surprised to hear that most recent college graduates know little about Lincoln or the Civil War and its causes, knowledge taken for granted in this film, which has Southerners trying to kill Lincoln before he can get to Washington in early 1861. There is much wonderful period detail:  the firearms of the period, that horses had to pull the train through Baltimore to avoid blackening the area's laundry with soot, Ruby Dee as a slave traveling with a Southern family, etc., but the period detail is not allowed to overpower the human drama.  Dick Powell continues to leave his juvenile persona behind, playing a detective from New York trying to stop a conspiracy that nobody else believes is real.  Cinematographer Paul Vogel and Mann do a superb job of capturing the tedium and claustrophobia of train travel in 1861 and use the night and smoke to create a paranoia and expressionism that bridges the gap between Mann's urban melodramas of the forties and the evocative landscapes of his fifties' Westerns.

Desperate (1947) is Mann's first film noir and the beginning of his artistic maturity, after a number of B movies.  Steve Brodie needs to earn money for his first child, about to be born, and takes a trucking job that turns out to be a heist.  When the heist goes bad and a cop is killed he flees across the country with his wife.  The clean air of the country and the farm of the wife's uncle and aunt gives him a brief respite, but he is pursued by sinister boss Raymond Burr, who blames Brodie for the conviction and pending execution of Burr's brother; the beauty of the country is defiled by the sinister thugs from the city.  One Hitchcockian element is that the police won't believe Brodie and won't protect him, they assume his guilt and are lazy and corrupt; Brodie finally succeeds in killing Burr himself. 

Both of these films have many holes in the plot, though I will confess that that is seldom something that bothers me: one of the traits of Mann (and film noir and Westerns both) is that existence is often not logical and tidy and one often has to use violence to combat fate.