Private Hell 36 is a 1954 American crime film noir directed by Don Siegel starring Ida Lupino, Steve Cochran, Howard Duff, Dean Jagger and Dorothy Malone.

[1] The picture was one of the last feature-length efforts by Filmakers, an independent company created by producer Collier Young and his star and then-wife Ida Lupino.

The film starts with a pre-credit sequence before the first titles appear in an early modernist foreshadowing of the action teaser before it became commonplace on television series of the sixties.

"[4] Private Hell 36 showcases a number of Siegel’s thematic concerns, among the crisis that occurs when “original assumptions [or] convictions are turned against a protagonist”[5] Film critic Judith M. Kass writes: Siegel demonstrates that love is not a refuge for man or woman, even for the couple (Howard Duff and Dorothy Malone) whose marriage is threatened by Duff’s anxiety and subsequent drinking.

For Siegel, love apparently complicates rather than ameliorates the existential loneliness of his characters, creating for them additional hurdles in their already turbulent emotional lives and forming, rather than eroding, barriers to feeling and closeness.