Film Gris, Brainstorm (1965) and Without Honor (1949)

I tend to limit my definition of film noir to the postwar period of chaos and uncertainty and up to the 50's of McCarthyism and the Cold War.  Things that are noirish but don't quite fit into the definition, such as William Conrad's Brainstorm and Irving Pichel's Without Honor, I prefer to call film gris.

I very much admire William Conrad as an actor, both as Marshall Matt Dillon on radio's Gunsmoke and in films such as Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946).  He was always bitter that he did not get the part of Matt Dillon on the TV version of Gunsmoke (he was considered too corpulent), though he did star in two other TV shows and directed many episodes of other series.  Brainstorm was one of the few feature films he directed. Brainstorm resembles Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) in some significant ways (I don't know if Conrad ever saw the Fuller film):  a man (Jeffrey Hunter) pretending to be insane kills the husband (Dana Andrews) of the woman he loves (Arlene Francis) and does actually go insane when the woman he loves doesn't want to wait for him to get out.  Conrad effectively shoots in widescreen black-and-white, with Sam Leavitt as cinematographer (he shot films for Fuller and Otto Preminger), with an intensive opening scene that has Hunter rescuing an inebriated Francis from her car deliberately stalled on the train tracks with a train boring down, though much of the mise en scene reminds one of television.  There are some significant noir signifiers in this film -- a femme fatale, a brooding sense of fatalism -- but the chaotic world is created by the participants, who are barely aware of their roles.

Irving Pichel's Without Honor sits somewhat off to the side during the period of the most successful film noirs; there is no mention of WWII but everyone is struggling to find their way in the post-war world of 1949.  Pichel was primarily a director of B films and he uses his one set (a suburban house) and five actors (Laraine Day, Dane Clark, Bruce Bennett, Agnes Moorhead and Franchot Tone) effectively.  Laraine Day is determined to marry Franchot Tone --both of them have spouses and Tone and his wife Moorhead have two daughters -- and when he says he can't leave his wife Day stabs him and hides him in a closet.  Then brother-in-law Dane Clark comes over, followed by Moorhead and Day's husband, Bruce Bennett, who brings with him a new TV, a common gift to make the wife happy which usually doesn't (see Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, 1956).  Recriminations on all sides ensue, with even the orange grove eventually covered in blood.