The Man with the Golden Arm

(Otto Preminger, 1955)
IMDB

Six month clean heroin addict, Sinatra, arrives in the lower side of town, surrounded instantly by temptation, with signs for liquor, drugs, beer and girls. 

His girlfriend, Sash, is wheelchair bound, as a result of his actions under the influence of heroin. She waits for him each day in an attic bedsit, understandably a bit mad and paranoid. It soon becomes clear that Sash is pretending to be disabled in order to keep Frankie to herself and away from the, by comparison, glamorous Molly, a dancer with whom he has history. The attic room is dull and cluttered and doesn't offer much excitement.

Frankie occasionally visits a shop window, showing an ideal middle-class kitchen, accentuating his longing for a better quality of living, away from temptation. The temptation though is only emphasized by the soundtrack and the great, booming brass interludes as he injects again and again.

The Night of The Hunter

(Charles Laughton, 1955)
IMDB

The terrifying Robert Mitcham, a real life bad boy, plays the leading role of a preacher, complete with love and hate knuckle tattoos. Laughton experiments with a lot of different shots, including aerial/ above shots and even a with camera attached to the front of a car.

Mitcham appears terrifying and looming, a black figure at the end of the garden in the shadow of a single street lamp, accompanied by the booming, great music each time he appears. He speaks with musicality and authority, casting a shadow over any other characters within his scenes.

In the attic room scene, there's a single bedside lamp that provides little light. The light from the single window casts across the set and the mother lies in bed, within the white light. The preacher casts a looming shadow over her and the room plunges into darkness as he stabs her. Later her body sits upright in a white car at the bottom of the river. Her hair blows with the current of the water, in synchronisation with the underwater reeds.

The preacher later appears haunting as a silhouette on the hill at dusk, chasing the children from their homes. And the children appear drifting downstream in a rowing boat, silhouetted against the the dark riverbank.