The Man with the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)
I think this was my favorite one yet. What I liked best was Preminger's enjoyable way of creating cinematic space within the frame. When Frankie gets off the bus in the beginning and is looking in through the window of the tavern and watching the action take place in the bar. And even more so, later on, when Frankie and Kim Novak's character are looking at the bourgeois kitchen display in the department store.

In the first instance Frankie's reality is projected looking in on the bar scene: addiction, need, scams, and cruelty. In the second instance it's fantasy: marriage, gender roles, material wealth. In both cases we observe character's phsychological subjectivity articulated through the act of looking.

Slavoj Zizek calls this "cinematic art at its purist."

On the way out Robin said that he didn't consider the film to be pure film noir. Although the ending was dark, he said, there was too much redemption.