Free Film Noir & Detective Movies to Watch Online
Film noir is the perfect genre for a free channel. A lot of the best examples were made quickly by small studios or independent producers, and a surprising number of them slipped into the public domain when nobody renewed their copyrights. They play around the clock on Case Files, our crime and mystery channel, alongside classic detective films going back to the silent era.
The essential noirs
D.O.A. has the best premise in the genre. Edmond O’Brien plays an accountant who walks into a police station to report a murder – his own. He’s been given a slow-acting poison and has a short time to find out who did it and why. Rudolph Mate directed, and the film moves like it knows the clock is running.
The Hitch-Hiker was directed by Ida Lupino, and it’s often cited as the first mainstream American noir directed by a woman. Two friends on a fishing trip pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a killer, and the rest of the film is a tense drive across the desert. It’s lean and frightening, with almost no wasted moments.
Scarlet Street is Fritz Lang at his darkest. Edward G. Robinson plays a meek cashier and amateur painter who falls for the wrong woman, played by Joan Bennett, while Dan Duryea plays her boyfriend. It’s not a crime film where anyone wins.
The Stranger is Orson Welles directing himself as a Nazi war criminal hiding under a new name in a quiet Connecticut town, with Edward G. Robinson as the investigator closing in and Loretta Young as the bride who doesn’t know who she married.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, which airs on Silver Screen, stars Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin, and it marks Kirk Douglas’s film debut. Lewis Milestone directed this story of a childhood secret that comes back years later.
Tough guys and heists
Kansas City Confidential, directed by Phil Karlson, stars John Payne as a delivery driver framed for an armored-car robbery who follows the trail to Mexico to find the masked men who set him up. Quicksand shows a side of Mickey Rooney you won’t have seen: he plays a mechanic who borrows twenty dollars from the till and sinks deeper and deeper, with Peter Lorre turning up along the way. Suddenly stars Frank Sinatra as a hired gunman who takes over a family’s house in a small town to assassinate the President, with Sterling Hayden as the sheriff.
The Amazing Mr. X is a stylish story about a phony spiritualist, and it’s worth watching just for John Alton’s moody cinematography.
Early Hitchcock
Three of Alfred Hitchcock’s British films air on Case Files, and together they show the director becoming himself. The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is a silent thriller about a mysterious lodger who may be a serial killer – it is often described as the first true Hitchcock film. Blackmail is widely cited as the first British feature with sound, and it uses that new sound in inventive ways. Murder! is a whodunit in which a juror becomes convinced the woman he helped convict is innocent. The silent The Manxman, a love triangle set on the Isle of Man, is also on the schedule.
Detectives and old dark houses
For classic sleuthing, two Philo Vance mysteries air on the channel: The Benson Murder Case with William Powell, and The Bishop Murder Case with Basil Rathbone. Bulldog Drummond gave Ronald Colman one of his first talking roles as the gentleman adventurer.
Roland West directed two films that are worth seeing together: Alibi, an early talkie gangster film, and The Bat Whispers, an old-dark-house mystery about a masked killer. For a later version of the same story, The Bat stars Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead.
Go back further and Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld is one of the earliest gangster films – its story won Ben Hecht the first Academy Award for writing. And The Front Page is the original screen version of the fast-talking newspaper play, which you can follow with Howard Hawks’ gender-swapped remake, His Girl Friday, over on Laugh Track.
How to watch
Case Files is scheduled television, so you tune in and join whatever’s playing, the same way you’d catch a late movie on a local station. Each film’s page shows its next airings in your own time zone. If you love these, our classic horror guide has plenty more shadowy black-and-white films for after dark. Tune in to Case Files any time.