The Woman in the Window (1944) & Scarlet Street (1945)

I love both of these. The "all a dream" ending is a cop-out but I blame the Code. A touchy issue for me since handing in a project for English at school and being humiliated in front of the class for using that device. (I think I thought that I was the first ever to do so).

Genuine Noirs, but early in the canon, so still contain traces of the '30s thrillers with their obligatory comic interludes. And ridicule of "modern" art was popular in this decade as well (see Elsa Lanchester in The Big Clock, the following year, where her juvenile daubs, like EGR's, belatedly become famous and valuable).