Filmed on location in Berlin, using a cast of amateurs in roles based on their actual day jobs, the timeless People on Sunday sustains a lyrical tranquility as people swim, listen to music, flirt, and generally enjoy their time away from the daily grind.

This early work of Siodmak’s, about a twisting and turning investigation into the murder of a Berlin prostitute, anticipates the tonality of his later work as well as the aesthetic and thematic concerns that would later define film noir as a genre.

This holiday-set 1933 tale of Oedipal jealousy and infidelity finds Siodmak adapting a 1913 novella by Stefan Zweig, atmospherically rendering it as a deft blend of melodrama and psychodrama.

Siodmak’s second feature made in the U.S. uses a Hitchcockian frame-up as a pretext for concocting a delightful, gripping curio that melds the espionage thriller and the screwball comedy.

Dracula (Lon Chaney Jr.) moves to New Orleans, marries a plantation owner’s daughter, and causes a major stir in Siodmak’s seminal work of horror, his first film for Universal and a sophisticatedly constructed crime film haunted by the supernatural.

Siodmak’s first foray into the genre that would come to define his artistry follows a secretary who must prove that her boss has been wrongly accused of murdering his wife, stumbling through an obscure labyrinth in search of a mysterious woman.

A melodramatic adventure film featuring iconic turns by Maria Montez and Sabu, Siodmak’s delirious South Seas tale is a camp masterwork notable for its curiously profound influence on American avant-garde film and theater.

A married man pines for a younger woman and sets in motion an increasingly knotty murder plot in this exemplary 1945 noir, starring Charles Laughton as a henpecked shopkeeper who finds himself in a shady, sticky situation.

The fourth of Siodmak’s Universal noirs features George Sanders as a mild-mannered bachelor living with his two grown sisters in the fading family manse—until a glamorous outsider (Ella Raines) arrives from New York, disturbing the siblings’ fragile psychic equilibrium.

Later celebrated as a precursor to theslasher film genre, Siodmak’s fifth noir for Universal follows proto–final girl Helen, a mute orphan who, while working as a housemaid for an affluent family, finds herself in the crosshairs of a serial killer targeting women with disabilities.

Scripted by prolific studio multihyphenate Nunnally Johnson, the most explicitly clinical of Siodmak’s psychologically inflected thrillers is a canny meditation on the fundamental, intractable mysteries of identity and personality.

Burt Lancaster had his first role in Siodmak’s classically dark adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway, who considered it the best movie ever made from his work.

Shot mostly on location in New York City, Siodmak’s gritty crime drama follows two childhood best friends who take divergent paths: one becomes a cop (Victor Mature); the other, a cop killer (Richard Conte).

Siodmak’s structurally sophisticated companion film to The Killers stars Burt Lancaster as a truck driver whose passion for his ex-wife (Yvonne De Carlo) drives him to the wrong side of the law.

Veteran femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck stars opposite Wendell Corey as the glamorous, enigmatic niece—and sole inheritor—of a wealthy murder victim in this economical yet emotionally potent variation on a classic genre premise.

After the conclusion of his Universal contract, Siodmak decamped to Columbia to helm this intricately plotted social drama chronicling the struggles of a factory labor union in a small New Hampshire town amid the post-WWII production downturn.

In one of his most personally cherished performances, Burt Lancaster stars as Captain Vallo, an 18th-century Caribbean corsair who gets tangled up in the intrigues and political unrest between two neighboring islands in this Technicolor adventure-comedy.