Home › Best classic film noir, ranked.
Classic film noir is one of the most distinctive bodies of work in American cinema history. Emerging from the shadows of World War II, drawing on German Expressionism, hard-boiled detective fiction, and French poetic realism, it produced a run of films from roughly 1940 to 1960 that remain among the most formally perfect and morally complex ever made.
What follows is a ranked list of the essential films — the ones that any serious film viewer needs to have seen, ordered by their importance to the genre and their lasting quality as films.
A dead screenwriter narrates his own murder from the opening frame. Joe Gillis, broke and desperate, hides his car in a garage on Sunset Boulevard and stumbles into the decaying mansion of Norma Desmond, a silent film star who has been forgotten by Hollywood but has not forgotten Hollywood. Gloria Swanson gives one of the most extraordinary performances in American cinema history — a woman so consumed by delusion that reality has ceased to exist for her. Billy Wilder made a film about Hollywood that Hollywood never forgave him for. The ending, Norma descending the staircase toward the cameras she imagines are there to film her comeback, is one of the most haunting images in cinema.
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See the beginner's guide. The blueprint for everything.
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Fritz Lang made this film in Germany in 1931, before Hitler came to power, and it remains one of the most disturbing and formally innovative films ever made. Peter Lorre plays Hans Beckert, a child murderer being hunted by both the police and the Berlin underworld — the latter because his crimes are bringing too much police attention to their operations. The film invented the procedural thriller, the psychological crime study, and the anti-hero all at once. Lang's use of sound — the murderer whistling Grieg, used to identify him — is one of the most brilliant devices in film history.
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Lang again, this time in Hollywood, making the most bleak and unforgiving film in the classic noir canon. Edward G. Robinson plays Christopher Cross, a timid cashier who paints in his spare time and falls completely under the spell of Joan Bennett's Kitty March and her boyfriend Dan Duryea. They steal his paintings, pass them off as Kitty's work, and systematically dismantle his entire life. There is no redemption in this film. Nobody learns anything. The ending is one of the most quietly devastating in American cinema — Cross wandering the streets, haunted by a voice he cannot silence.
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See the beginner's guide. The definitive noir fatalism.
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See the beginner's guide. One of the most beautiful films ever made.
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See the beginner's guide. Bogart's best performance.
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Orson Welles directed, starred, and had Columbia Pictures dye Rita Hayworth's hair blonde, destroying her carefully constructed image as a brunette femme fatale. The plot is deliberately incomprehensible — a sailor entangled in a murder plot involving a corrupt lawyer and his wife. What matters is the atmosphere: the yacht trip through the Panama Canal, the aquarium scene, the hall of mirrors finale. One of the most visually extravagant films in the noir canon and one of the most formally strange.
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James Cagney as Cody Jarrett, a gangster with a pathological attachment to his mother and a hair-trigger temper. Top of the world, Ma. The climax — Cody standing atop an exploding gasoline storage tank, screaming in triumph as the flames consume him — is one of the great endings in American crime cinema. Walsh made a film that is simultaneously a gangster picture and a psychological study, and Cagney's performance is one of the most ferocious in Hollywood history.
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The heist film. A jewel robbery planned with mathematical precision by a criminal mastermind just released from prison, executed by a crew of specialists, and undone by the human frailties of each participant. Huston's film is the template for every heist movie made since — The Italian Job, Heat, Reservoir Dogs, Ocean's Eleven — all of them owe something to The Asphalt Jungle. Sam Jaffe as Doc Riedenschneider is one of the great tragic figures in noir: brilliant, meticulous, undone by a pretty girl.
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The essential classic film noirs are Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Out of the Past (1947), Laura (1944), and Double Indemnity (1944).
Roughly 1940 to 1960, when Hollywood produced the bulk of the classic noir films.
Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Otto Preminger, and Nicholas Ray are the essential classic noir directors.
Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon are consistently cited as the most watched and most influential classic film noirs.