50 free Film Noir trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Film noir trivia for classic-movie fans, TCM devotees and anyone who has ever quoted Double Indemnity in a rainstorm. The quiz starts with the arguments: who coined the term and when, whether noir is a genre or a style, and which film gets called the first true noir (hint: it lost RKO money and starred Peter Lorre). From there it covers the roots in German Expressionism, poetic realism and the hardboiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Cornell Woolrich; the classic-period landmarks from The Maltese Falcon and Laura through Out of the Past, Gun Crazy, Kiss Me Deadly and Touch of Evil; the directors, from Siodmak, Lang and Preminger to Ida Lupino, Hollywood's only woman director of the era; the femmes fatales of Stanwyck, Hayworth and Greer; and the visual grammar of Venetian-blind shadows, Dutch angles and night-for-night shooting. Later rounds go abroad to Rififi, The Third Man and Kurosawa, and forward to Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Blood Simple, L.A. Confidential and the neon-noir of Blade Runner. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Humphrey Bogart, Alfred Hitchcock and classic Hollywood quizzes.
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Q 01Which French critic first applied the term 'film noir' to Hollywood films in 1946?
Nino Frank
He was probably inspired by the Série noire crime-fiction imprint launched a year earlier.
Q 02Which decades are generally regarded as the classic period of American film noir?
The 1940s and 1950s
At the time, most of these pictures were simply called melodramas.
Q 03What did most Americans call films now labelled noir before the term caught on in the 1970s?
Melodramas
Historians and critics defined the category retrospectively.
Q 04Which two French critics wrote the 1955 Panorama, the first extended study of the subject?
Borde and Chaumeton
Borde and Chaumeton called noir 'oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel'.
Q 05Noir's shadowy visual style has its roots in which artistic movement?
German Expressionism
Émigrés such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Michael Curtiz brought the look to Hollywood.
Q 06Which 1931 Fritz Lang film about a child murderer is seen as an early fusion of noir style and plot?
M
Its star Peter Lorre later headlined Stranger on the Third Floor, often called the first true noir.
Q 07Which 1941 film, though not itself a noir, had perhaps the greatest influence on the genre's development?
Citizen Kane
Its visual intricacy and voiceover flashback structure echo through dozens of classic noirs.
Q 08Which literary school was the primary influence on film noir?
Hardboiled crime fiction
Its early leaders were Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, published in pulps like Black Mask.
Q 09Whose novels became Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice?
James M. Cain
His less heroic protagonists gave a name to a subset of the hardboiled school: 'noir fiction'.
Q 10Whose novels were adapted into The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key?
Dashiell Hammett
His debut Red Harvest later loosely inspired the Coens' Miller's Crossing.
Q 11Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplays for Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia and which Hitchcock film?
Strangers on a Train
His own novels became Murder, My Sweet, The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake.
Q 12Which writer's work was the basis for more classic-period noirs than any other, thirteen in all?
Cornell Woolrich
He also wrote as George Hopley and William Irish; Black Angel and Phantom Lady are among the adaptations.
Q 13Which 1940 RKO B-picture is most commonly cited as the first true film noir?
Stranger on the Third Floor
Q 21Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951) are noirs satirising what?
Hollywood and the news media
Sunset Boulevard, like D.O.A., is a story narrated by a dead man.
Q 22Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945) was unusual among classic noirs for being what?
Officially censored in several places
Its erotic innuendo got it temporarily banned in Milwaukee, Atlanta and New York State.
Q 23Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948) was noted for which approach, inspired by Italian neorealism?
Documentary-style location shooting
Directed by Boris Ingster, it lost the studio $56,000, and nobody noticed a trend beginning.
Q 14Which cinematographer shot both The Invisible Man (1933) and The Maltese Falcon (1941)?
Arthur Edeson
The Universal horror film is the one that comes closest to noir in story and sensibility.
Q 15Who played Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941)?
Humphrey Bogart
It was John Huston's directing debut.
Q 16What was Barbara Stanwyck's Double Indemnity femme fatale named, in a nod to Marlene Dietrich?
Phyllis Dietrichson
The Billy Wilder film's seven Oscar nominations made it probably the most influential early noir.
Q 17Which actress played the title 'bad girl' in Gilda (1946)?
Rita Hayworth
Turner, Gardner and Greer followed in The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killers and Out of the Past.
Q 18Which 1955 film ends with the 'great whatsit' revealed as an exploding atomic bomb?
Kiss Me Deadly
Robert Aldrich's Mickey Spillane adaptation is the noir most often cited as Cold War paranoia on film.
Q 19Which 1958 Orson Welles film is frequently cited as the last noir of the classic period?
Touch of Evil
Henry Mancini's score helped create the popular idea that noir sounds like sleazy jazz.
Q 20Which director made Laura (1944) and worked in the noir mode more than any other celebrated Hollywood director?
Otto Preminger
Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends and Angel Face followed.
Dassin was blacklisted and later made Rififi in France.
Q 24Which noir actress became the only woman directing in Hollywood during the classic era?
Ida Lupino
She does not appear in her best-known directing effort, The Hitch-Hiker (1953).
Q 25Which cult 1945 noir did Edgar G. Ulmer direct for the Poverty Row studio PRC?
Detour
It is one of seven classic noirs made largely outside the majors that sit in the National Film Registry.
Q 26Gun Crazy (1950) is famous for a bank hold-up filmed how?
In one unbroken take of over three minutes
Its screenplay was written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, using a front.
Q 27The Killers (1946) marked the film debut of which star?
Burt Lancaster
Robert Siodmak directed him again in Criss Cross (1949).
Q 28Which cinematographer, known for 'hypnotic moments of light-in-darkness', shot T-Men and The Big Combo?
John Alton
He worked closely with director Anthony Mann on a run of late-1940s noirs.
Q 29Which 1947 Jacques Tourneur film did Robert Ottoson call 'the ne plus ultra of forties film noir'?
Out of the Past
Tourneur had made more than thirty B pictures before this A-level production.
Q 30Which 1949 Raoul Walsh noir climaxes with an explosion at a chemical plant?
White Heat
Industrial settings such as refineries and trainyards host many noir finales.