Vincente Minnelli’s rich Tinseltown melodrama, for which Grahame won an Oscar, resembles an inside-Hollywood exposé but ends as a grim tragedy about a man driven to appalling ends by a mixture of hubris and sheer malice. With Lana Turner, Dick Powell, and Kirk Douglas.

Grahame spends much of Fritz Lang’s bleak, thrilling noir with her face half-concealed, but her performance as a gangster’s moll—a magnificent combination of pride, fear, restlessness, confidence, and doubt—is the film’s center of gravity.

Joan Micklin Silver’s wise, melancholic, criminally under-seen third feature, about a Utah civil servant’s obsession over the women who left him, includes one of Grahame’s final screen performances.

Vincente Minnelli’s star-studded melodrama features Richard Widmark as a dedicated psychiatrist, Charles Boyer as the philandering doctor whose fires he is tasked with putting out, and Gloria Grahame and Lauren Bacall as the psychiatrist’s wife and possible love interest, respectively.

This adaptation of Richard Brooks’s novel The Brick Foxhole, about a group of vets, led by Mitchum’s Sergeant Keeley, searching postwar Washington for their amnesiac friend so they can clear him of a murder charge, embodies the essence of what has come to be known as “film noir.”

The centerpiece of Fritz Lang’s Zola adaptation is Grahame’s towering performance as the dissatisfied, vengeful wife of a brutish conductor she aims to have killed. Grahame, who is alternately shrill, desperate, savvy, imploring, and ferocious, may have never dominated a movie the way she does here.

Grahame gave one of her finest performances in Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece of moral and psychological ambiguity, as an aspiring actress committed to a screenwriter (Humphrey Bogart) who may—or may not—be capable of murder.

Mitchum stars as an American runaway tasked with capturing a crime lord as he woos a singer played by Jane Russell in this atmospheric crime yarn known for its unpleasant, tumultuous production.

As the put-upon bar-singer mistress of a psychotic cop killer, Grahame finds surprising, unexpected emotional registers in what could have been a stock role—whenever she’s onscreen, this thrilling, stripped down B-noir seems to rearrange itself around her.

Robert Wise’s study of a perfect heist derailed by one robber’s racial prejudice was among the last of a certain stripe of hard-boiled, rough-edged film noirs. Fittingly, it also contains one of Grahame’s last great performances, as the crook’s lonely, alluring neighbor. With Ed Begley, Robert Ryan, and Harry Belafonte.

By the time she was cast as the simple-minded, unfashionable Ado Annie in Fred Zinnemann’s massive screen musical, Grahame’s public image was battered. But whether by choice or chance, she gave the role precisely the sort of awkward hesitancy it required.

Grahame’s first collaboration with Nicholas Ray, whom she would go on to marry soon after the film wrapped, is a genre-blurring murder mystery that works equally well as a flashback-driven whodunit and as a backstage performance melodrama.