BFI's One Great Film Noir for Every Year (1940-59)

Created by Chilton.

Favorited 2 times, disliked 0 times, added to 7 watchlists.

Nobody knew what to call film noirs when they first started coming out of Hollywood in the early 1940s. Reviews of the time call them “tough melodramas”, “murder mysteries” or simply “crime dramas”.

The French had the solution. When movies such as Double Indemnity, Laura and Murder, My Sweet (all 1944) saw delayed release in Paris after the end of the Second World War, critics likened them to the ‘romans noirs’ of 1930s crime novelists such as Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett. The term ‘film noir’ stuck.

For most of the 1940s and 50s, this style of crime film was dominant. You can spot them by their shadowy visuals and shady morals. Hard-talking men fall for duplicitous dames, as cigarette smoke wreaths around them on dark street corners or in rooms with the slatted blinds pulled down.

Hot on the heels of the Great Depression and the traumatising violence of the war, film noir reflected a world-weary fatalism in the American mood (and in the many European émigré filmmakers who had fled to Hollywood). The movies borrowed angular lighting effects from 1920s German films and a poetic gloominess from 1930s French films, wrapping it all up in tantalising packages of grit, glamour and cynicism.

Here’s one key film from each of the influential cycle’s peak years. (Plus three more to "See Also")