Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1956). Peered at through the binoculars of modern retrospection, it’s nearly impossible to look at this nineteen-fifties film noir and not see Fargo in one of the lenses. The Coen brothers classic shared a lot of DNA with this nicely nasty piece of work, though the earlier feature has more of a rhino-charge insistence in its straightforward storytelling. Unassuming lug Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray, the era’s specialist in unassuming lugs) is an itinerant commercial artist whose troubled past catches up to him when he’s tracked down by some crooks who are convinced he’s holding on to a hefty stash of money they stole. In the midst of these dangerous happenings, Jim falls for a model (Anne Bancroft, clearly bristling with need for something more substantive to play). As directed by Jacques Tourneur, with his usual grim aplomb, Nightfall is compact and hard as a billiard ball. Brian Keith and Rudy Bond are properly unnerving as the film’s heavies, and the climactic comeuppance manages to be impressively gruesome while keeping the violence off-screen.

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (Allan Arkush, 1979). It feels foolish to register complaints about the scruffy filmmaking of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. So what if the narrative structure is slapdash and most of the craft elements are amateurish. The film has the Ramones tooling around in a convertible with a giant GABBA-GABBA-HEY license plate and Clint Howard as a leisure suit–clad sharpie who peddles social upgrades to nerdy students out of a lavish office set up in a bathroom stall. This is the stuff of cinema gold. Allan Arkush paces the film with a blithe, devil-may-care energy that gives the inspired bits an extra zing and makes the dorkier gags forgivable. His choice to turn over a chunk of the film to a Ramones concert, complete with singalong lyrics on the screen, goes a long way towards making this a vital artifact of the era instead of a negligible lark. Most of the performances are hammy and forgettable, but P.J. Soles pops with delirious charisma as cheery rebel Riff Randell.

The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980). Splendidly seedy and slyly stylish at the same time, The Long Good Friday is a decent British gangster flick that is most notable for the ferocious lead performance by Bob Hoskins. In the film, Hoskins plays Harold Shand, a crime boss who is feeling puffed up as he closes in a development project that will put him in more legitimate company as a businessman. His plans go awry when his associates and businesses are targeted by outside forces he can’t quite pin down. Director John Mackenzie presses in on Hoskins’s acting, which is the rough equivalent of a steel rope fraying apart. The power Hoskins brings to part upsets the equilibrium of the storytelling. At times, everyone else and everything else seems to fall away. Even Helen Mirren, playing Shand’s romantic partner, can’t quite carve out her place in the film up against the coiled tornado that is Hoskins. As might be expected of a movie of this temperament from this era, a few details haven’t aged all that well.