Best Crime Movies of 1950

Recently paroled from prison, legendary burglar "Doc" Riedenschneider, with funding from Alonzo Emmerich, a crooked lawyer, gathers a small group of veteran criminals together in the Midwest for a big jewel heist.

Bart Tare is an ex-Army man who has a lifelong fixation with guns, he meets a kindred spirit in sharpshooter Annie Starr and goes to work at a carnival. After upsetting the carnival owner who lusts after Starr, they both get fired. Soon, on Starr's behest, they embark on a crime spree for cash.

Frank Bigelow is about to die, and he knows it. The accountant has been poisoned and has only 24 hours before the lethal concoction kills him. Determined to find out who his murderer is, Frank, with the help of his assistant and girlfriend, Paula, begins to trace back over his last steps. As he frantically tries to unravel the mystery behind his own impending demise, his sleuthing leads him to a group of crooked businessmen and another murder.

A police detective's violent nature keeps him from being a good cop.

One night in the New Orleans slums, vicious hoodlum Blackie and his friends kill an illegal immigrant who won too much in a card game. The next morning, Dr. Clint Reed of the Public Health Service confirms the dead man had pneumonic plague. To prevent a catastrophic epidemic, Clint must find and inoculate the killers and their associates, with the reluctant aid of police captain Tom Warren, despite official skepticism, and in total secrecy, lest panic empties the city. Can a doctor turn detective? He has 48 hours to try.

A single mistake puts a 19-year old girl behind bars, where she experiences the terrors and torments of women in prison.

A fisherman with money problems hires out his boat to transport criminals.

Robbers Ray Biddle and his brother are shot and taken to the local hospital. There, the two are treated by Dr. Brooks, the hospital's only black doctor. The brothers assault Brooks with racist slurs. And, when his brother ends up dying on the operating table, Ray accuses the doctor of murdering him. Blind with rage, Ray works to turn the white community of the city against Brooks, who finds an unlikely ally in the dead man's widow, Edie.

Fed up with her small-town marriage, a woman goes after the big time and gets mixed up with the mob.

Frank Johnson, a sole witness to a gangland murder, goes into hiding and is trailed by Police Inspector Ferris, on the theory that Frank is trying to escape from possible retaliation. Frank's wife, Eleanor, suspects he is actually running away from their unsuccessful marriage. Aided by a newspaperman, Danny Leggett, Eleanor sets out to locate her husband. The killer is also looking for him, and keeps close tabs on Eleanor.

Ralph Cotter, a ruthless criminal, escapes violently from a farm prison. Then, he seduces a dead inmate’s sister, gets back quickly into the crime business, faces corrupt local cops who run the city’s underworld and meets a powerful tycoon’s whimsical daughter.

The Skipper is a charming old man loved by all his neighbors. What they don't know is that he is also Mr. 880, an amateurish counterfeiter who has amazingly managed to elude the Secret Service for 20 years.

The U.S. government recognizes land grants made when the West was under Spanish rule. This inspires James Reavis to forge a chain of historical evidence that makes a foundling girl the Baroness of Arizona. Reavis marries the girl and presses his claim to the entire Arizona territory.

When a young woman's skeletal remains turn up on a Massachusetts beach, Barnstable cop Peter Moralas teams with Boston police and uses forensics, with the help of a Harvard professor, to determine the woman's identity, how she died, and who killed her.

Wealthy writer Stephen Byrne tries to seduce the family maid, but when she resists, he kills her. Long jealous of his brother John, Stephen does his best to pin the blame for the murder on his sibling. Also affected by Stephen's arrogant dementia is his long-suffering wife Marjorie.

A family man -desperate for a job- latches onto a friend that encourages him into being a criminal.

A struggling young father-to-be gives in to temptation and impulsively steals an envelope of money from the office of a corrupt attorney. Instead of a few hundred dollars, it contains $30,000, and when he decides to return the money things go wrong and that is only the beginning of his troubles.

The middle-class family of a young woman cannot understand why she delays in marrying a respectable young man. They know nothing about her long-standing affair with a Frenchman.

P.C. George Dixon is a long-serving traditional copper who is due to retire shortly. He takes a new recruit under his aegis and introduces him to the easy-going night beat. Dixon is a classic ordinary hero but also anachronistic, unprepared and unable to answer the violence of the 1950s.

While executing an armored car heist in Los Angeles, icy crook Dave Purvis shoots policeman Lt. Phillips before he and his cronies make off with the loot. Thinking he got away scot-free, Purvis collects his money-crazy mistress, Yvonne, then disposes of his partners and heads out of town. What Purvis doesn't know is that Phillips' partner, tough-as-nails Lt. Cordell, is wise to the criminal's plans and is closing in on his prey.

An American doctor gets caught in the middle of a revolution when he's forced to operate on a South American dictator.

A young woman who has just become engaged has her life completely shattered when she is raped while on her way home from work.

Angered that her sister Celia has stolen her fiance, Dell Faring kills her and allows Celia's husband David, knocked out in an argument with Celia, to take the blame and end up on death row. Later Dell, finding out that David's young daughter Susan was witness to the crime and is undergoing psychiatric treatment, plans to eliminate her before her memory returns.

A prison warden fights to prove one of his inmates was wrongly convicted.

The wife of a psychoanalyst falls prey to a devious quack hypnotist when he discovers she is an habitual shoplifter. Then one of his previous patients now being treated by the real doctor is found murdered, with her still at the scene, and suspicion points only one way.

Police catch a break when suspected kidnappers are spotted on a train heading towards Union Station. Police, train station security and a witness try to piece together the crime and get back the blind daughter of a rich business man.

Gamblers who "took" an out-of-town sucker in a crooked poker game feel shadowy vengeance closing in on them.

A blacklisted reporter brings his shady ways to a small-town newspaper after being fired from a big city daily.

The Horatio Alger parable gets the film noir treatment with the redoubtable Edmund O’Brien as a whip-smart telephone technician who moves up the ladder of a Syndicate gambling empire in Southern California until distracted by an inconveniently married Joanne Dru and his own greed. Ripped from the headlines of the 1950 Kevaufer Organized Crime Hearings, this fast-moving picture is laden with location sequences shot in Los Angeles, the Hoover Dam and Palm Springs including the famous Doll House watering hole on North Palm Canyon Drive!

A veteran homicide detective who has witnessed his socialite girlfriend kill her husband sees his inexperienced brother assigned to the case.

When he's discharged from a military hospital, ex-GI Bob Corey goes on a search for his army buddy Steve Connolly. A reformed crook, Connolly is on the lam from a trumped-up murder rap, and Corey hopes to clear his pal. Tagging along is Army nurse Julie Benson, who has fallen for Corey.

Al Goddard, a detective who works for the United States Postal Inspection Service, is assigned to arrest two criminals who've allegedly murdered a U.S. postal detective.

A petty crook moves to an Ohio town and courts a factory owner's disabled daughter.

Two undercover agents infiltrate a drug-smuggling ring in Mexico, thee find them selves falling in love with each other. Neither is aware of the other's identity As they decide to make a run for the border.

Detectives investigate the Central Park murder of a young woman with a Marine Corps tattoo.

Director Peter Godfrey's 1950 drama, inspired by true events, dramatizes the crime spree of the notorious jewel thief known as "The Hollywood Raffles", whose famous robbery victims included such real-life celebrities as Joan Crawford, Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith and Dennis Morgan. David Brian stars in the title role, and he's supported by John Archer, Marjorie Reynolds, Jacqueline de Wit, Alix Talton, Ned Glass, Perdita Chandler and columnist Sheilah Graham, playing herself.

The "Tri-State" gang goes on a successful bank robbing streak causing local authorities to turn up the heat on the daring career criminals.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, mill heiress Deborah Chandler Clark (Ida Lupino) is dead, killed in a freak auto accident. But Deborah is alive, if not too well. Having discovered a horrible truth about her new husband (Stephen McNally), Deborah is now a “woman in hiding,” living in mortal fear that someday her husband will catch up with her again. When a returning GI (Howard Duff) recognizes Deborah, however, she must decide whether or not she can trust him.

After her father is murdered, a girl joins the police force in an effort to track down the killers.

An American is on the run in the streets and back alleys of France.

Jack Early is a photographer who will stop at nothing to climb his way to the very top of the success ladder. On the strength of his sheer tenacity, he gets a job with a major newspaper, and it's not long before he's made a name for himself by charming a notorious crime boss, Nick Palmer, into allowing himself to be photographed. Palmer takes him under his wing, but Early decides to bite the hand that feeds him and sets Palmer and another crime boss, Colton, against one another.

In turn-of-the-century New York, an Italian seeks vengeance on the mobsters who killed his father.

A famous mystery writer uses his own plot tricks to murder a blackmailer in this British thriller.

After leaving the British Secret Service, David Somers (played by Trevor Howard) finds work cataloging butterflies at the country house of Nicholas and Jess Fenton. After the murder of a local gamekeeper, suspicion (wrongfully) falls on their niece, Sophie Malraux (Jean Simmons). Somers helps Sophie to escape arrest and they go on the run together. After a cross-country chase they arrive at a coastal city with the intention of leaving the country by ship. All's well that ends well after the true identity of the murderer is revealed.

Two con artists join forces and pose as brother and sister. He then meets rich widows through the "personals" sections of newspapers, marries them, and both kill the widows for their money.

A man wrongly accused of a crime must decide between getting involved in a prison break, or remaining in jail until his wife can prove his innocence.

Singer Steve, friend Seymour and fiance Jane, along with her dizzy blonde room mate Irma, have a series of misadventures on a California-bound train and end up involved with a gang of murderous gangsters in Las Vegas.

A cop poses as a member of a stolen-car ring to capture the men responsible for the murder of his fiancee's brother.

Larry Nelson, paroled from prison after serving nearly half of his thirty-year sentence, is determined to not fall into the clutches of the law again, and takes a quiet job at a country sanitarium. Thete, he meets and falls for a nurse, Charlotte Maynard, and he knows the only way to enter her web is to have a lot of money, for Miss Maynard is somewhat of a gold-digger.