Universal Film Noir Collection

Who doesn't like film noir? It's probably the one genre with an equal measure of male and female fans, and its allure has not dated yet. Perhaps these films have captured so much interest because they themselves captured so much. The 1940s saw a world at war on many fronts, be it international, ideological, or between class or gender. At the centre was a man with no side but his own, a side that could be sidled up to by whichever girl was to come along. Whether they stuck a knife in it or not could sometimes only be known once it had happened.

Film noir also showed up men's fear of commitment (it's been famously said that in film noir, marriage is death) as much as their fear of betrayal. But the strong female characters that were created opposite them were loved by women and men alike, allowing a sexually-charged banter in movies that was unseen previously.

Universal's latest collection of classic noirs contains some of the best of the genre, and some of the most unique. Murder My Sweet's first-person perspective allows us to see through Philip Marlowe's eyes even when he's been slipped a Mickey Finn, in a Chandler adaptation that matches modern noirs such as Momento in its experimentation with the genre. Similarly, The Killers is told in flashback, as we retrace the steps of Burt Lancaster's down-on-his-luck ex-boxer - a film that was echoed years later in Cronenberg's A History of Violence. The Blue Dahlia has Alan Ladd returning from war expecting to start his life again, but finding it isn't going to be quite so easy now his wife is first a drunk, then dead. Ladd and femme fatale Veronica Lake smoulder throughout, as they do in The Glass Key and This Gun For Hire.

Other Universal noirs to have their DVD debut include Mitchum classics Out Of The Past, Crossfire and The Big Steal. For those of us who, until now, had to wait in hope for these films' appearance on Channel Four at lunchtime in order to see them, it's a selection much-deserving of a digital transfer.