“Christmas Holiday” (1944) — in which Siodmak was tasked with providing Universal’s stellar ingénue, Deanna Durbin, an adult role, namely a chanteuse in a New Orleans bordello — is a noir as odd as its title. It’s an intricately lighted gothic romance that casts Gene Kelly as a neurotic tough guy and makes near-surreal use of Wagner’s “Liebestod.” Siodmak was next given a pair of overly genteel films that, if not noir, were predicated on the noirish situation of a respectable man — Charles Laughton in “The Suspect” (1944) and George Sanders in “The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry” (1945) — driven by love to domestic homicide.

Then Siodmak was on loan to RKO for the lurid thriller “The Spiral Staircase” (1946). A week after this hit shocker opened, The New York Times reported that Siodmak was “disturbed by the many recently published references to him as ‘a second Alfred Hitchcock.’ ” His next Universal film, “The Dark Mirror” (1946), a doppelgänger mystery starring a twinned Olivia de Havilland, only reinforced that idea of Siodmak as a director of clever psychological thrillers. But Siodmak’s third release of 1946 was something else.

The luxuriantly bleak epitome of mid-’40s pessimism, “The Killers” confirmed the visual primacy of Siodmak’s style (particularly as realized by the cinematographer Elwood Bredell, who shot both “Christmas Holiday” and “Phantom Lady”) while revealing a new harshness of tone. Elaborating through flashbacks on the laconic Ernest Hemingway story of a doomed ex-boxer and the hit men sent to dispatch him, “The Killers” is a sort of deadly bolero in which the newcomer Burt Lancaster alternately awaits death and desperately pursues an elusive femme fatale (Ava Gardner in her first leading role).