The acting duo of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake was first teamed in the superb early noir thriller This Gun For Hire (1942) (with the tagline: "He's dynamite with a gun or a girl"). From the novel A Gun For Sale by renowned British novelist Graham Greene, the moody noir featured Ladd in a star-making role (his first lead role) as a ruthless, cat-loving, vengeful, unsmiling San Francisco professional hit-man named Raven working for a peppermint-candy loving fat man Willard Gates (Laird Cregar) and his wheelchair-bound Nitro Chemicals executive Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall) - both double-crossers who were selling secrets to foreign agents (the Japanese). Ladd was paired with popular wartime pinup star Lake as nightclub showgirl singer Ellen Graham, his hostage (and unbeknownst to him working as a federal agent).

Cast
Zoe Felix
Eric Savin
Arie Elmaleh
Ivan Franek
Igor Skreblin
Margaux Guenier
Philippe Krhajac
Jana Bitternova
Clara Barbosa
Typhaine Hilaire
Thais Fischer
Goran Kostic
Eric Kailey
Sacha Mijovic

Dana Andrews, an obsessed detective who is assigned to investigate the murder of a beautiful woman (Gene Tierney) and question suspects (Vincent Price and Clifton Webb) in Otto Preminger's classic Laura (1944), falls in love with a painting of the victim. In the second film version of Dashiel Hammett's novel about political corruption, The Glass Key (1942), Alan Ladd in one of his earliest films starred opposite Veronica Lake as a deadpan hero. He was often beat up by sado-masochistic gangster William Bendix during his pursuit of the truth. Glenn Ford portrayed an unrestrained police detective in pursuit of his wife's killers and corrupt cops in Fritz Lang's film noirish The Big Heat (1953). In William Wyler's seminal cop film Detective Story (1951), bitter, tough, and by-the-book NYC detective Kirk Douglas discovered that his wife (Eleanor Parker) had a guilty secret.

Cast:
* Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers
* Mila Kunis as Lily
* Vincent Cassel as Thomas Leroy
* Barbara Hershey as Erica Sayers
* Winona Ryder as Beth MacIntyre
* Benjamin Millepied as David
* Ksenia Solo as Veronica
* Kristina Anapau as Galina
* Janet Montgomery as Madeline
* Sebastian Stan as Andrew
* Toby Hemingway as Tom
* Sergio Torrado as Sergio

Film Noir (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics (first by Nino Frank in 1946) who noticed the trend of how 'dark', downbeat and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France to theatres following the war, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Double Indemnity (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Laura (1944). A wide range of films reflected the resultant tensions and insecurities of the time period, and counter-balanced the optimism of Hollywood's musicals and comedies. Fear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia are readily evident in noir, reflecting the 'chilly' Cold War period when the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present. The criminal, violent, misogynistic, hard-boiled, or greedy perspectives of anti-heroes in film noir were a metaphoric symptom of society's evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict, purposelessness and sense of injustice. There were rarely happy or optimistic endings in noirs.

Ghosts as the subject of films date back to World War II era and post-war romantic comedies. A lengthy list of films with angels in them can be found in the genre section on fantasy films. Originally, supernatural apparitions were not intended to frighten audiences, but to entertain as they assisted earth-bound characters out of crazy predicaments, or interacted with them. For example: