50 Fun Facts About Film Noir

Which French critic first applied the term 'film noir' to Hollywood films in 1946?

He was probably inspired by the Série noire crime-fiction imprint launched a year earlier.

Which decades are generally regarded as the classic period of American film noir?

At the time, most of these pictures were simply called melodramas.

What did most Americans call films now labelled noir before the term caught on in the 1970s?

Historians and critics defined the category retrospectively.

Which two French critics wrote the 1955 Panorama, the first extended study of the subject?

Borde and Chaumeton called noir 'oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel'.

Noir's shadowy visual style has its roots in which artistic movement?

Émigrés such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Michael Curtiz brought the look to Hollywood.

Which 1931 Fritz Lang film about a child murderer is seen as an early fusion of noir style and plot?

Its star Peter Lorre later headlined Stranger on the Third Floor, often called the first true noir.

Which 1941 film, though not itself a noir, had perhaps the greatest influence on the genre's development?

Its visual intricacy and voiceover flashback structure echo through dozens of classic noirs.

Which literary school was the primary influence on film noir?

Its early leaders were Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, published in pulps like Black Mask.

Whose novels became Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice?

His less heroic protagonists gave a name to a subset of the hardboiled school: 'noir fiction'.

Whose novels were adapted into The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key?

His debut Red Harvest later loosely inspired the Coens' Miller's Crossing.

Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplays for Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia and which Hitchcock film?

His own novels became Murder, My Sweet, The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake.

Which writer's work was the basis for more classic-period noirs than any other, thirteen in all?

He also wrote as George Hopley and William Irish; Black Angel and Phantom Lady are among the adaptations.

Which 1940 RKO B-picture is most commonly cited as the first true film noir?

Directed by Boris Ingster, it lost the studio $56,000, and nobody noticed a trend beginning.

Which cinematographer shot both The Invisible Man (1933) and The Maltese Falcon (1941)?

The Universal horror film is the one that comes closest to noir in story and sensibility.

Who played Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941)?

It was John Huston's directing debut.

What was Barbara Stanwyck's Double Indemnity femme fatale named, in a nod to Marlene Dietrich?

The Billy Wilder film's seven Oscar nominations made it probably the most influential early noir.

Which actress played the title 'bad girl' in Gilda (1946)?

Turner, Gardner and Greer followed in The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killers and Out of the Past.

Which 1955 film ends with the 'great whatsit' revealed as an exploding atomic bomb?

Robert Aldrich's Mickey Spillane adaptation is the noir most often cited as Cold War paranoia on film.

Which 1958 Orson Welles film is frequently cited as the last noir of the classic period?

Henry Mancini's score helped create the popular idea that noir sounds like sleazy jazz.

Which director made Laura (1944) and worked in the noir mode more than any other celebrated Hollywood director?

Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends and Angel Face followed.

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951) are noirs satirising what?

Sunset Boulevard, like D.O.A., is a story narrated by a dead man.

Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945) was unusual among classic noirs for being what?

Its erotic innuendo got it temporarily banned in Milwaukee, Atlanta and New York State.

Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948) was noted for which approach, inspired by Italian neorealism?

Dassin was blacklisted and later made Rififi in France.

Which noir actress became the only woman directing in Hollywood during the classic era?

She does not appear in her best-known directing effort, The Hitch-Hiker (1953).

Which cult 1945 noir did Edgar G. Ulmer direct for the Poverty Row studio PRC?

It is one of seven classic noirs made largely outside the majors that sit in the National Film Registry.

Gun Crazy (1950) is famous for a bank hold-up filmed how?

Its screenplay was written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, using a front.

The Killers (1946) marked the film debut of which star?

Robert Siodmak directed him again in Criss Cross (1949).

Which cinematographer, known for 'hypnotic moments of light-in-darkness', shot T-Men and The Big Combo?

He worked closely with director Anthony Mann on a run of late-1940s noirs.

Which 1947 Jacques Tourneur film did Robert Ottoson call 'the ne plus ultra of forties film noir'?

Tourneur had made more than thirty B pictures before this A-level production.

Which 1949 Raoul Walsh noir climaxes with an explosion at a chemical plant?

Industrial settings such as refineries and trainyards host many noir finales.

Lady in the Lake (1947) is remarkable for being shot how?

Star and director Robert Montgomery's face is glimpsed only in mirrors.

Which shadow pattern, cast across an actor or set, is the most iconic noir visual cliché?

The chiaroscuro style borrows its name from Renaissance painting.

Which tilted camera set-up is a common noir device of disorientation?

Mirrors, frosted glass and night-for-night shooting served the same purpose.

Which colour films of 1945 and 1953 are routinely included in noir filmographies?

The Marilyn Monroe thriller and the Gene Tierney melodrama both make the lists.

Historian Lee Server called which plot device 'noir's version of the common cold'?

Protagonists also assume the identities of dead men in nearly fifteen percent of noirs.

Which composer scored Double Indemnity, The Killers and Criss Cross?

Paramount's music director disliked the harsh Double Indemnity score, but Wilder backed it.

The blacklisted Jules Dassin made which celebrated French noir in 1955?

He had shot his last English-language noir, Night and the City, in Britain under political pressure.

Which French director is known for minimalist noirs such as Le Samouraï and Le Cercle rouge?

Bob le flambeur (1955) came from the classic period itself.

Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1943) was an unofficial adaptation of a novel by which American writer?

It is regarded as both a great noir and a seminal film in the birth of neorealism.

Which Japanese director made noirs including Stray Dog (1949) and High and Low (1963)?

Drunken Angel and The Bad Sleep Well are others in his noir vein.

Which 1974 Roman Polanski film, set in 1930s Los Angeles, is the most acclaimed neo-noir of its era?

Robert Towne's screenplay pushed noir's loss-of-innocence theme back a decade to make it crueller.

Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) recast which detective as a hapless misfit?

Some critics were outraged by the irreverence toward the Chandler original.

Which 1981 film, set in humid Florida, confirmed the commercial viability of neo-noir?

Lawrence Kasdan wrote and directed it.

Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997) adapted a novel by which writer?

The deliberately retro film is set in 1953, the year its story could have been shot.

Which German-born director made eight classic-era noirs, including Phantom Lady and Criss Cross?

Only Fritz Lang and Anthony Mann matched his tally; The Killers and Cry of the City were also his.

Which 1947 British noir, adapted from a Graham Greene novel, was directed by John Boulting?

Scholar Andrew Spicer argues 'Brit noir' owes more to French poetic realism than to the expressionist American style.

Which South Korean director made the noirs Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Thirst?

Wikipedia's film noir entry singles him out as the most prominent non-US filmmaker in a noir mode since 2000; Sin City (2005) was the 2000s' most commercially successful neo-noir.

Which ultra-low-budget 1958 Columbia film may qualify as the first intentional neo-noir?

Irving Lerner's deadpan joke on noir likely inspired both Melville's Le Samouraï and Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Which 1982 film, paying homage to classic noir, most directly influenced the cyberpunk genre?

Ridley Scott's dystopian Los Angeles wedded noir mood to science fiction, a fusion later dubbed tech-noir.

Which Coen brothers film of 2001 is a black-and-white crime melodrama set in 1949?

It features a scene apparently staged to mirror one from Out of the Past.