Not noir, but noir-adjacent, and definitely “suburban angst”: Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment (1957), based on a novel by John McPartland, offers a sharp (and great-looking) take on the postwar American Dream, California subdivision-style. Terrific cast (Jeffrey Hunter, Sheree North, Cameron Mitchell, Tony Randall, Joanne Woodward) with Pat Hingle a standout as an ordinary but really rather extraordinary decent guy. He and Barbara Rush reverse the polarities - the husband is more sensitive, liberal, and enlightened than the wife. The movie was an acknowledged key influence on the makers of Knots Landing, pretty much universally regarded as the best prime-time soap of the Eighties, and which in its turn was in the DNA of Desperate Housewives (along with A Letter to Three Wives, and all the manifestations of Peyton Place). The dark suburbs are where soapiness crosses paths with noirishness.
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