Home › Best noir of the 1940s.
Film noir was born in the 1940s. The causes are much debated — the influence of German Expressionism brought by emigre filmmakers fleeing the Nazis, the darkness of the World War II years, the hard-boiled detective fiction of Hammett and Chandler and Cain, the French poetic realism of the 1930s. Whatever the causes, the result was one of the most distinctive bodies of film ever produced: dark, morally complex, formally precise, and deeply pessimistic about human nature and American institutions.
The blueprint. Bogart. Huston. The beginning of everything. Sam Spade will sell you out if it is in his interest to do so — this was genuinely shocking in 1941 Hollywood. See the beginner's guide for the full analysis.
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Fritz Lang's most despairing film. Edward G. Robinson as a timid cashier who paints on weekends, falls under the spell of Joan Bennett's Kitty March and her boyfriend Dan Duryea, and is systematically dismantled. No redemption. Nobody learns anything. One of the essential noirs.
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Robert Mitchum and the best face for doom in cinema history. He knows he is doomed. He goes through with it anyway.
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A detective falls in love with a dead woman through the portrait in her apartment. Gene Tierney. David Raksin's score. One of the most beautiful films ever made.
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Fritz Lang made three essential noirs and this is the one consistently overlooked next to Scarlet Street. Edward G. Robinson again. Joan Bennett again. A different trap.
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James Cagney as Cody Jarrett, a gangster with a mother fixation and a hair-trigger temper. Top of the world, Ma. The climax is one of the great endings in American crime cinema.
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Welles directed, starred, and had Rita Hayworth dye her hair blonde. The hall of mirrors finale. Completely strange and completely essential.
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Joan Crawford's Oscar. A woman who builds an empire while her daughter dismantles it. The noir structure — murder opening, told in flashback — wrapped around a story about maternal obsession.
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The Maltese Falcon (1941) is generally considered the foundational 1940s noir. Scarlet Street (1945), Out of the Past (1947), and Laura (1944) are equally essential.
The Maltese Falcon (1941) established the template. Earlier films like M (1931) and Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) anticipated the genre.