A trope so common, TCM is spending an entire night on it!

I'm pretty certain I've mentioned when blogging movies like Leave Her to Heaven that it's not uncommon for noir and similar movies to open up with a scene that goes to a flashback giving us the real action of the movie. In fact, TCM is programming an entire night of such films tonight, and not even using Leave Her to Heaven.

The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Joan Crawford in Possessed, that being the 1947 movie. (Crawford was in a movie with the same title in 1931, but that's before noir and doesn't have flashbacks.) It's been a while since I've seen the movie, but if memory serves, it opens with Crawford in an insane asylum, where some of her incoherent rantings lead to the flashback.

A different sort of flashback comes in They Won't Believe Me, at 10:00 PM, where the flashback is in Robert Young's testimony to the court.

I'm not certain whether I've seen Humphrey Bogart in Dead Reckoning before. That's one you can catch at 11:30 PM.

A movie worth mentioning is The Bribe, at 3:15 AM. Robert Taylor plays a government agent who's fallen in love with Ava Gardner, and the flashback catches up just before the climax. I was going to do a full-length post on it, but it's on the schedule for later in the month, and at the dinner hour at that. It's also coming up again in August, so a full-length post will come later.