Impact
1949 · 110 min
Impact (1949), a San Francisco film noir with Brian Donlevy, Ella Raines and Anna May Wong. Watch the full 1940s crime movie free, with no account needed.
An industrialist's wife and her lover arrange his death on a mountain road. It goes wrong in a way that leaves him alive, unidentified and free to vanish into a small town as a garage mechanic, which is about where a normal thriller would be wrapping up and where this one starts again.
Arthur Lubin shot it entirely in Northern California, on Nob Hill, in Sausalito and out at Larkspur, at a time when most studio crime pictures never left the back lot. Brian Donlevy and Ella Raines carry it, and Charles Coburn turns up as the detective.
Anna May Wong plays the housekeeper, her first film in seven years, and she is the only person in the story standing between an innocent man and the chair.
Free to watch via internet-archive.