Film noir isn’t real­ly a genre. It’s a mood. Its ele­ments are so well known that they bor­der on self-par­o­dy. Neon lights. Inky black shad­ows. An emp­ty bot­tle of whiskey. A gun. A dame with a past. A des­per­ate, doomed man.

Like Ger­man Expres­sion­ism dur­ing the 1930s, it was a cul­tur­al pro­cess­ing of a his­toric trau­ma. Like French Poet­ic Real­ism dur­ing that same decade, film noir is fixed in a par­tic­u­lar cul­ture dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar time. In this case, the cul­ture was the inher­ent­ly opti­mistic one of the Unit­ed States. The time was just after World War II when the foun­da­tions of that opti­mism were severe­ly test­ed. A gen­er­a­tion of men returned from Europe and the Pacif­ic scarred and dazed by the mind-bog­gling car­nage of the war only to dis­cov­er that their women were doing just fine work­ing in fac­to­ries and offices. Is it any won­der then that per­haps the most fre­quent trope in noir is of a man, seem­ing­ly tough but riv­en with weak­ness, undone by a pow­er­ful, sex­u­al­ly-dom­i­nat­ing femme fatale?

Though those gen­der roles were quick­ly reshuf­fled and women were, for a time, ban­ished back to the realm of domes­tic­i­ty, cracks remained in the brit­tle veneer of Amer­i­can mas­culin­i­ty. Add to that exis­ten­tial anx­i­eties over the bomb and the Red Scare’s cor­ro­sive para­noia and you have a whole tox­ic stew of cul­tur­al fears bur­bling out of the Amer­i­can col­lec­tive uncon­scious. And film noir artic­u­lat­ed those fears bet­ter than just about any­thing else.

Of course, the rea­son film noir has proved to be so endur­ing is because of its look. The spare light­ing, the cant­ed angles, the grotesque shad­ows. It’s Ger­man Expres­sion­ism cast through the lens of Orson Welles. Its stark style meld­ed per­fect­ly with noir’s bleak cyn­i­cism. It should come as no sur­prise that some of the best noir direc­tors – Fritz Lang, Robert Siod­mak and espe­cial­ly Bil­ly Wilder – fled Ger­many for the warmer climes of Hol­ly­wood. The style was also cheap — lots of shad­ows means less mon­ey spent on lights. It was a boon for the scores of inde­pen­dent pro­duc­ers who made noirs on a shoe­string.

If you want get into that film noir mood, Open Cul­ture has 50, count ‘em, 50 film noir movies that you can watch right now for free. They include:

• Detour Free – Edgar Ulmer’s cult clas­sic noir film shot in 6 days. (1945)
• D.O.A. — Free — Rudolph Maté’s clas­sic noir film. Called “one of the most accom­plished, inno­v­a­tive, and down­right twist­ed entrants to the film noir genre.”  (1950)
• The Hitch-Hik­er —  Free –  The first noir film made by a woman noir direc­tor, Ida Lupino. It appears above. (1953)
• The Naked Kiss — Free - Con­stance Tow­ers is a pros­ti­tute try­ing to start new life in a small town. Direct­ed by Sam Fuller. (1964)
• The Stranger — Free – Direct­ed by Orson Welles with Edward G. Robin­son. One of Welles’s major com­mer­cial suc­cess­es. (1946)

Check out the full list of 50 free noir films here, or find them in our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Fritz Lang’s Cen­sored Noir Film, Scar­let Street, Star­ring the Great Edward G. Robin­son (1945)

Detour: The Cheap, Rushed Piece of 1940s Film Noir Nobody Ever For­gets

Watch D.O.A., Rudolph Maté’s “Inno­v­a­tive and Down­right Twist­ed” Noir Film (1950)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

The begin­ning of the 1972 doc­u­men­tary Future Shock, direct­ed by Alex Grasshof, shows Orson Welles, beard­ed and chomp­ing on a cig­ar, stand­ing on an air­port peo­ple mover. He turns to the cam­era and deliv­ers a mono­logue in his trade­mark silken bari­tone. “In the course of my work, which has tak­en me to just about every cor­ner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phe­nom­e­non which I’m just begin­ning to under­stand. Our mod­ern tech­nolo­gies have changed the degree of sophis­ti­ca­tion beyond our wildest dreams. But this tech­nol­o­gy has exact­ed a pret­ty heavy price. We live in an age of anx­i­ety and time of stress. And with all our sophis­ti­ca­tion, we are in fact the vic­tims of our own tech­no­log­i­cal strengths –- we are the vic­tims of shock… a future shock.”

The doc­u­men­tary itself is won­der­ful­ly dat­ed. From its bizarre open­ing mon­tage; to its sound­track, which lurch­es from ear­ly elec­tron­ic music to jazz funk; to some endear­ing video spe­cial effects, which, for what­ev­er rea­son, most­ly cen­ters around Orson Welles’s head, the film feels thor­ough­ly root­ed in the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion. Yet many of the ideas dis­cussed in the movie are, if any­thing, more rel­e­vant now than in the 1970s.

The term “future shock” was invent­ed in Alvin Tof­fler’s huge­ly best­selling book of the same name to describe the con­stant, bewil­der­ing bar­rage of new tech­nolo­gies and all the result­ing soci­etal changes those tech­nolo­gies bring about. Any­one who has strug­gled to com­pre­hend a new, baf­fling and sup­pos­ed­ly essen­tial social media plat­form, any­one who has been dri­ven to paral­y­sis over the num­ber of choic­es on Net­flix, any­one who found their liveli­hood dec­i­mat­ed because of a hot new app knows what “future shock” is.

Tof­fler (along with his wife and uncred­it­ed co-writer Hei­di Tof­fler) argued that we are in the midst of a mas­sive struc­tur­al change from an indus­tri­al soci­ety to a post-indus­tri­al one – a soci­ety that bog­gles the mind with an over­load of infor­ma­tion and an over­load of con­sumer choic­es. “Change,” as they wrote, “is the only con­stant.”

Along the way, the Tof­flers man­aged to pre­dict the col­lapse of Amer­i­ca’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, along with things like Prozac, temp jobs, the inter­net and the mete­oric rise and fall of ins­ta-celebs (Alex from Tar­get, we hard­ly knew you.) Oth­er pre­dic­tions – under­wa­ter cities, paper clothes and being able to choose your own skin col­or – haven’t yet come to pass. Still, they had a sur­pris­ing­ly good track record con­sid­er­ing these pre­dic­tions were writ­ten over four decades ago.

The video ends with a plea from not Welles, but Tof­fler him­self, who is seen address­ing col­lege stu­dents.

If we can rec­og­nize that indus­tri­al­ism is not the only pos­si­ble form of tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety, if we can begin to think more imag­i­na­tive­ly about the future, then we can pre­vent future shock and we can use tech­nol­o­gy itself to build a decent, demo­c­ra­t­ic and humane soci­ety. […] We can no longer allow tech­nol­o­gy just to come roar­ing down at us. We must begin to say “No” to cer­tain kinds of tech­nol­o­gy and begin to con­trol tech­no­log­i­cal change, because we have now reached the point at which tech­nol­o­gy is so pow­er­ful and so rapid that it may destroy us, unless we con­trol it. But what is the most impor­tant is we sim­ply do not accept every­thing; that we begin to make crit­i­cal deci­sions about what kind of world we want and what kind of tech­nol­o­gy we want.

Find oth­er short films nar­rat­ed by Welles in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.