A Brief History of Film Noir

Ironically, given that it is the cinematic genre most obsessed with death, film noir is the genre that will not die. Although its heyday was undoubtedly the post-World War II period, it has continued to infiltrate almost all cinema since with seemingly endless new variants on its original virus as neo-noir, future noir, and even Southern or Gothic noir.

What Is Film Noir?

Emerging from the hardboiled fiction or detective literature of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler in the late 1920s and 1930s, noir arguably found its true home in the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. After all, when we think of noir, we automatically think of film noir, not noir literature.

It was a Frenchman, Nino Frank, who coined the term “film noir,” meaning a “black or dark film,” in 1946, and it was the French who popularised the term, often retrospectively applying it to films that were originally thought of as “melodramas.” The fantastically twisted, even corrupted films that seemed to capture the French national mood after wartime occupation far surpass the insipidness of that word. Having lived through and somehow survived the “noir world” of Nazism, they had acquired a taste for the bitter rather than the banal. So, noir was a far better name for dark crime films.

Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which was such an influence nearly half a century later on Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), was literally a nuclear noir. Often, the effect of noir was more akin to that of nuclear fallout than an actual nuclear blast: seeping, creeping, and inescapable.

Noir fell out of fashion in the 1960s, certainly in comparison with its immediate post-war heyday, just as film (or at least American film) struggled during what was probably Hollywood’s darkest decade of the 20th century. But just like so many of its main characters, noir refused to die and roared back to life in the 1970s with neo-noir (new noir) that was even deadlier than the original.

In the 21st century, when we are in another noir world of rising autocracy and impending ecological collapse, the genre is due to another revival, one that might just be more spectacular than those that have gone before. But here are ten great 20th-century noirs, that show the scope, scale, and sheer ambition of the deadliest genre of all.

‘The Maltese Falcon’

1. The Maltese Falcon (1941): The First Great Noir

Written and directed by John Huston, based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett

Candidates for the title of the first film noir include Underworld (1927), Josef Von Sternberg’s silent movie about a gangster, and M (1931), Fritz Lang’s German expressionist classic about a child murderer. However, there is general agreement that the first great film noir and the one that established the template for so much of the noir that followed is The Maltese Falcon (1941).

The Maltese Falcon was one of the greatest debuts in cinematic history, which is often forgotten because it appeared in the same year as the greatest debut in cinematic history, Citizen Kane. However, it also marked one of the greatest rebirths in cinematic history because it was the film that made Humphrey Bogart a star.

Bogart had been a bit-part player and then a minor star for nearly a decade before High Sierra (1941), the only other real contender for the title of the first great film noir. But it was The Maltese Falcon, in which he completely realized Hammett’s detective hero Sam Spade on screen, that both made his name and made noir as a genre.

Read More: The Maltese Falcon: The Archetype of Noir

‘Ossessione’ (1943)

2. Ossessione (1943): Neorealist Noir

Co-written and directed by Luschino Visconti, based on (but not credited as such) the novel The Postman Always Knocks Twice by James M. Cain

Arguably the most famous theft in film history is Ossessione, Luchino Visconti’s 1943 debut, which was an entirely uncredited “lift” of the storyline from James M. Cain’s classic 1934 noir novel, The Postman Always Knocks Twice, which, of course, would be filmed in Hollywood in 1946, when Cain would finally get his due (and credit).

Both Ossessione and The Postman Always Knocks Twice are superb film noirs, with Ossessione perhaps edging it, if only because of its extraordinary backstory. 

The Big Sleep (1946)

3. The Big Sleep (1946): Classic (If Confusing) Noir

Directed by Howard Hawks and written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman, based on the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep of the title is, of course, death, and there is a seemingly unending succession of deaths, or at least disappearances, in the film, so much so that it is famously difficult to keep track of them all. And that’s not just true of anyone watching it; it also seems to have been true of those making it. Hence, the famous telegram that director Howard Hawks reportedly sent to Raymond Chandler, asking who had killed the Chauffeur, whose disappearance puts the whole plot in motion. Even more famously, Chandler later wrote to a friend: “Dammit, I didn’t know either.”

But plot can be overrated, as proven by the continuing brilliance of The Big Sleep. Even if it can be tricky, to say the least, to keep tabs on who has killed whom and why, what is beyond doubt is that Hawks, Bogey, and Bogey’s new love, Lauren Bacall, created the classic noir template, arguably even more so than The Maltese Falcon, with a private detective in over his head, a beautiful woman being swept off her feet by said private detective and a gloriously black-and-white cinematographic world. All of this supports the theory of the American film critic Thomas Schatz that noir is less a genre and more of a style of filmmaking.

‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950)

4. Sunset Boulevard (1950): Hollywood Noir

Hollywood noir is a sub-genre that effectively positions the American film industry itself as “the bad guy”, preying on an endless stream of victims, all of whom think they can “make it” in La La Land. It is a small sub-genre, almost a micro-genre, but the two finest examples both come from 1950.

The first is In A Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece about a screenwriter, played by Humphrey Bogart, who becomes a murder suspect. Nevertheless, the greatest Hollywood noir is one of the greatest films ever made, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.

Read More: Nobody’s Perfect: Explore the Movies of Cinematic Legend Billy Wilder

Wilder often recounted how the celebrated opening of Sunset Boulevard was originally very different.  Initially, he filmed a sequence where they wheel the corpse of screenwriter Joe Gillis into a morgue. Then, when the orderlies leave, the other corpses come to life and ask him how he got there.

Wilder eventually decided that this darkly comic opening was just too absurd for the dark, brutal, and uncompromising film that followed it, and instead settled on probably the greatest opening (and voiceover) in film history.

That false or ditched opening was the only misstep that Wilder and his great co-writer and fellow co-producer, Charles Brackett, made on Sunset because the rest is pitch-black-perfect. Above all, they had probably the greatest femme fatale in film noir, in the form of Gloria Swanson’s gloriously unhinged Norma Desmond. Ultimately unable to distinguish between film and reality, she steals the show and achieves perhaps the most perverse form of perfection ever captured on screen.

‘The Killing’ (1956)

5. The Killing (1956): Kubrick’s Noir

Written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, with “Dialogue” by Jim Thompson, based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White

Stanley Kubrick is unquestionably one of the greatest film directors ever. Indeed, in a recent assessment of The 100 Best Directors of All Time for The Script Lab, I identified him as the greatest film director in the English language and I am not alone in making that assessment. However, it could all have been so different for Kubrick but for The Killing, the magisterial film noir that he made in 1956, which effectively saved his nascent directing career and established the template for all the great Kubrick films that followed.

Later in his career, Kubrick disowned the first two feature films he had made, Fear and Desire (1952) and Killer’s Kiss (1955), and instead described The Killing as his de facto debut. It certainly marked the first great film he made, setting him on the path to making a succession of films that might be called “BIG” (or Best in Genre) films. From The Killing onwards, almost all of Kubrick’s films were either the best or among the best in their particular genre.

That pattern of mastering different cinematic genres, one by one, began with The Killing. The story of a racetrack heist that goes wrong was based on a relatively undistinguished noir novel that Kubrick elevated to greatness with sublime cinematography, editing, and dialogue, even if he needed a little help with the latter from Jim Thompson, a master of noir literature. But from The Killing onwards, and especially with “The Insanity Trilogy” of the 1960s and early 1970s—Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971)—Kubrick made a killing, both artistically and commercially, and effectively slew all his competitors in cinema.

Read More: 4 Rare Stanley Kubrick Adaptation Screenwriting Tips

6. Touch of Evil (1958): The Last Great Noir of the Original Noir Era?

Written and directed by Orson Welles, based on the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson

Some film historians argue that Citizen Kane was a film noir. Its fractured storytelling and deep-focus photography make a compelling case for including it in the genre. What is beyond doubt is that nearly 20 years later, after he was exiled from Hollywood and his epic sojourn in Europe, during which he starred in The Third Man (1950)—the greatest British film noir and arguably the greatest European noir—Orson Welles made a classic noir in Hollywood, Touch of Evil. Many often regard it as the last great noir of the original era of noir.

Welles always maintained that he had to completely rewrite the script he received, starting with the title, taken from the source novel, Badge of Evil. Touch of Evil is infinitely better and more suggestive; indeed, it could almost be the motto for the entire noir genre. And there is more than a mere touch of evil in Welles’ border lawman Hank Quinlan, who achieves spectacular results through nefarious means.

Touch of Evil is rightly celebrated for its virtuoso, one continuous take opening—later aped in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992)—but it is far more than that opening. Indeed, it is probably the best illustration of how the most memorable characters in film noir are not its supposed heroes (lawyers, policemen, or private detectives) but its nominal villains (corrupt lawyers, lawmen, etc.). And the last line of the film, delivered by Marlene Dietrich at the end of what was probably her last great film performance, effectively served as an epitaph for both Quinlan and Welles.

7. Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) (1958): The Great French Noir

Directed by Louis Malle, and written by Malle and Roger Nimier, based on the novel of the same name by Noël Calef

It is fitting that the country that coined the term film noir should itself have produced so many fine film noirs. Indeed, the entire nouvelle vague or French New Wave that swept the world in the 1960s was enormously indebted to noir and even produced some fine examples, notably Alphaville (1965), Jean-Luc Godard’s genre-mashing collision of noir and science fiction. 

However, the film that is arguably the finest French film noir of all came before Godard and François Truffaut began surfing their new wave. That was Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows).

‘Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows)’ (1958)

If Touch of Evil is principally remembered for its illustrious opening, then Ascenseur pour l’échafaud is most often celebrated for its genuinely ground-breaking soundtrack by Miles Davis, which was largely improvised by Davis and his musicians as they watched the film for the first time. Nevertheless, even that incredible score is just one ingredient in the delicious but deadly cocktail that is Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows).

Narratively, for example, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) is fascinating, combining both the usual action elements of a noir (especially the murder of an unloved husband by his wife’s lover) and complete inaction, indeed entrapment, when the murderer, trying to conceal his crime, becomes trapped in a lift. Even this semi-summary of the plot suggests how Malle was deliberately messing with the classic elements of noir while simultaneously enhancing, even exaggerating, the sense of inevitability, which is at the heart of so many great noirs.

‘Chinatown’ (1974)

8. Chinatown (1974): The Greatest Noir?

Directed by Roman Polanski and written by Robert Towne

Chinatown is the greatest neo-noir, a term used to describe the crop of new and even darker noirs that emerged in the early 1970s. The assertion that it is the greatest noir of all is more debatable. However, fifty years have passed since its release in the same year as The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and other films that arguably make 1974 one of the greatest years in screenwriting. Consequently, it is now easier than ever to make that argument.

Chinatown is one of the most mythical films ever made, as shown by its continuing resonance in popular culture, from jokes in Frasier (“Forget it, Marty, it’s Belltown!”) to the definitive book about its creation, Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (2020). For a screenwriter, the most fascinating aspect of Wasson’s book is the detailed examination of its screenplay.

Wasson convincingly argues that the bleakness, or even utter noirness, of Chinatown’s ending was ultimately down to its director, Roman Polanski, who insisted that it should have not just an unhappy ending but an utterly despairing ending. Of course, Polanski’s own experience of tragedy in LA influenced this, following the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by the members of the Manson Family. The result was that there is surely no darker ending in all of cinema than that of Chinatown.

Read More: The Most Gripping Thriller Movies: Can You Handle the Suspense?

‘Blade Runner’ (1982)

9. Blade Runner (1982): Future Noir Incarnate

Directed by Ridley Scott, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novella by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

If the first great film noirs, such as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, were based on the first great noir novels by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, then it was appropriate that the greatest reboot of the genre, Blade Runner, should have been based on the work of another great American novelist, Philip K. Dick, from a later era (the 1950s). 

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for Blade Runner, he effectively cross-bred ’50s sci-fi with ’30s detective fiction to create future noir. Ridley Scott thrillingly brought that new genre to the screen some thirty years later.

Famously, Dick wept when he first saw the opening of Blade Runner. Scott was horrified, fearing that he hated what he’d seen, but in reality, as Dick explained, it was what he had been imagining all along. 

If Los Angeles was the birthplace of noir, both in literature and cinema, then Blade Runner shows a fully realized city of noir: simultaneously a dreamscape and a nightmarish reality of unending rain, enormous neon advertisements, and “skin jobs,” the name given to the human-like androids who return to earth looking for their creator, and revenge.

Blade Runner was a flop on release in the early 1980s but has since become one of the most influential and beloved films of the last half-century. Films about cloning have endlessly cloned or rebooted themselves. However, as with all the best films and stories, the original remains unsurpassed.

Read More: Moving Monologue: The Best Movie Monologues That Leave Audiences Speechless

‘Blood Simple’ (1984)

10. Blood Simple (1984): Southern or even Gothic Noir

Directed by Joel Coen, written by Joel and Ethan Coen

What links the last two films on this list, apart from their greatness as noirs, is M. Emmet Walsh, the amazing Hollywood character actor who died recently. He appeared in Blade Runner and the Coen Brothers’ classic neo-noir debut, Blood Simple. There was something about his aged face, drawl of a voice, and sheer air of unpleasantness on screen that seemed to hark back to the earliest noirs.

The sequence from Blood Simple that was replayed in the wake of the great M. Emmet’s death was its best sequence: the ending, which, simply put, is one of the greatest sequences in noir and all of cinema. It comes when Walsh’s double-crossing private detective has cornered Frances McDormand’s terrified adulteress, Abby, in her apartment—or so he thinks.

What follows was an iconic sequence. Alongside the famous dolly sequence in Jaws (1975), where the camera seemingly races up the beach towards the terrified Chief Brody, it was probably my first introduction to the art of film directing. Forty years on, it remains all that anyone needs to know about making noir or indeed any kind of cinema

Read More: Behind the Venetian Blinds: A Peek at Great Film-Noir Movies