Because of just what you've outlined here, I clicked on the Netflix "DOCUMENTARY" category and have become addicted.
It's the only genre that haven't been corrupted by Barack and Big Mike's hands...usually 3 or 4 episodes...how they gather evidence and garner confessions.
Have to get 'SOMETHING' for my $18 @ month.
I am a big fan of film noir from the forties and fifties. No messages for the most part except evil gets defeated by good in most of them. There were even many anti-communist flicks made during that period.
Many of the films are less than great, but it is interesting to see many of the artifacts from those years depicted in the films.
One very interesting film from 1950 that I saw the other day, "The Sound Of Fury" starring Frank Lovejoy and Lloyd Bridges was about a lynching of two kidnappers who killed their victim based on a true story of a lynching that took place in California in the thirties.