Film noir didn’t know it was film noir. The term was coined by French critics after World War II to describe a cycle of American crime pictures steeped in shadow and cynicism, but the filmmakers themselves were simply reflecting a changed world. Drawing on the starkness of German Expressionism, the films traded in hard contrasts: light and dark, law and lawlessness, desire and consequence.
Noir is less a genre than a worldview, one in which moral clarity is elusive and corruption runs deep. Its protagonists are compromised men undone as often by their own weaknesses as by external forces. Nearby is the femme fatale, whose allure is matched only by her capacity for destruction. Taken together, these elements form a body of work that captures the postwar mood of disillusionment with bracing, often brutal clarity. These are the 15 best film noirs.
15. Detour (1945, dir. Edgar Ulmer)
A Poverty Row treasure from legendary B-movie director Edgar G. Ulmer, Detour is noir at its cheapest (reportedly shot in six days), grittiest and most cynical. Tom Neal is Al Roberts, a piano player hitchhiking from New York to California in hopes of reconciling with his girlfriend (Claudia Drake), who is pursuing stardom in Hollywood. Roberts might be noir’s all-time stupidest protagonist—and that’s saying something—who keeps accidentally leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake. “Detour is a nightmare, one in which the unconscious overwhelms rational thought and takes off on mesmerizing and implausible leaps of logic,” writes Eddie Muller in Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. “That’s why it works best viewed at 2:30 a.m., through half-closed eyes, with Neal’s self-pitying soliloquies snaking around your defenseless mind.” Detour’s antihero makes one boneheaded choice after another, falling in with Vera, played with malevolent gusto by Ann Savage, the most evil femme fatale of them all. Dumb plus evil never turns out well.
14. The Big Heat (1953, dir. Fritz Lang)
It’s not easy being an honest cop in a city of corruption. Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) is looking into an open-and-shut suicide of a fellow officer when he is told to stop asking questions of the man’s widow. The dead man’s mistress tells Bannion there’s more to the case just before she winds up in the city morgue. Bannion keeps investigating. His wife is killed in a car bomb meant for him. That tragedy sends the cop on an obsessive quest—even after Bannion is forced to turn in his badge—to take down Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby), the crime boss who has infested the city. His one-man vengeance tour endangers the one woman willing to help him; Gloria Grahame is heartbreaking as the girlfriend to Lagana’s brutal enforcer (Lee Marvin). “While it coolly surveys the all-inclusive political/police corruption of a small city, it is equally concerned with the corruption of a decent man’s soul,” writes Danny Peary in Cult Movies 2. The Big Heat is aptly named. Bannion is willing to burn down everything in his path.
13. The Killing (1956, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Stanley Kubrick’s critical breakthrough, The Killing is noir at its most hard-nosed—a grim, unsentimental account of a racetrack robbery. Leading the crooks is Johnny Clay, played by Sterling Hayden in a less sympathetic twist on his similar role in The Asphalt Jungle (see #11). Scripted by Kubrick and pulp novelist Jim Thompson, the film’s adherence to genre conventions is offset by its nonlinear narrative, which is what attracted Kubrick to the source material (Lionel White’s Clean Break) in the first place. United Artists execs, baffled by the nonlinear structure, urged the young filmmaker to recut it in chronological order. Kubrick held firm, but was less successful keeping UA from inserting a Dragnet-ish voice-over narrator. Even that compromise, however, adds to The Killing’s staccato rhythm. The cast brims with strong character actors such as Elisha Cook Jr., Timothy Carey, Jay C. Flippen and Marie Windsor, the latter of whom put the fatale in femme fatale. The Killing is one of the best heist movies; its influence is evident in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), among others.
12. Gun Crazy (1950, dir. Joseph H. Lewis)
Bart Tare (John Dall) and Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) meet at a carnival shooting contest, take one lusty look at each other, and all but throw down then and there. Penned by MacKinlay Cantor and blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (under a pseudonym), Gun Crazy’s lurid tale of lovers bonded by a shared passion for firepower and crime is raw, exciting and propulsive. Dall and Cummins, relative unknowns when they were cast, have sizzling chemistry, and they are well-served by the go-for-broke visual style of B-movie director Joseph H. Lewis. In one showy but undeniably effective scene, he positions the camera directly behind Bart and Laurie as they drive into a small town, rob a bank, are confronted by a police officer, and speed away—all in one uninterrupted shot. The film’s DNA—blurring eroticism and violence—courses through everything from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994).
11. The Asphalt Jungle (1950, dir. John Huston)
For noir gloomier than a roomful of morticians, few movies can match John Huston’s dire adaptation of W.R. Burnett’s 1949 novel of the same name. Desperate, small-time crooks come together for a jewel heist, but double-crosses invariably ensue. The Asphalt Jungle helped establish a template for successive caper flicks ranging from Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (see #13) to Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955). It teems with such first-rate character actors as Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore and Marc Lawrence, and features one of Marilyn Monroe’s first appearances, in a brief but memorable turn as the mistress to Calhern’s shady attorney, Alonzo Emmerich. Huston and co-writer Ben Maddow make it clear their sympathies, and ours, are with the thieves, a fact the Production Code’s chief prig Joseph Breen tried to soften to little avail. And why should he have? “What is crime,” muses (rhetorically) Emmerich, “but just a left-handed form of human endeavor?”
10. Nightmare Alley (1947, dir. Edmund Goulding)
Tyrone Power finally got to show 20th Century Fox chief Darryl Zanuck that he was more than a pretty face with Nightmare Alley, a role for which he had lobbied hard. In adapting William Lindsay Gresham’s bestseller, director Edmund Goulding and screenwriter Jules Furthman concocted perhaps the bleakest of all noirs. Power is Stan Carlisle, a charming carnival huckster who gets rich with a mind-reading scam he learns from a carny psychic (Joan Blondell). Stan’s ambitions are matched by his powers of seduction—this is 1940s heartthrob Tyrone Power, after all—and so he woos and runs off with a sexy carnival worker, Molly (Coleen Gray), to tour the country as “the Great Stanton.” The con man finds someone more unscrupulous than himself when he meets psychotherapist Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), with whom he collaborates to fleece her wealthy patients. Guillermo del Toro directed a sleek, respectable remake in 2021, but not even contemporary cinema’s cynicism can make a dent in the misanthropy of the 1947 original.
9. Kiss Me, Deadly (1955, dir. Robert Aldrich)
This unapologetically mean-spirited adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s pulp paperback bestseller is a fistful of nasty. The opening credits alone underscore that this is not a typical crime picture. They roll backward over an over-the-shoulder oner of private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) and a distraught hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman) racing along the highway in Hammer’s convertible Jaguar. They are forced off the road shortly after arriving in Los Angeles. The woman is kidnapped, tortured and murdered, and Hammer is caught in a web of Cold War intrigue. Meeker snarls, smirks and slugs his way in a performance that shows why Spillane’s private dick is, to be blunt, a prick. Robert Aldrich’s direction mirrors the brutishness of his antihero. Kiss Me, Deadly ain’t pretty. It’s fast, punchy and occasionally disorienting, Its legion of admirers included French critic and future filmmaker François Truffaut. “Watching a film like this is such an intense experience that we want it to last for hours,” he wrote at the time of its theatrical release. “It is easy to picture its author as a man overflowing with vitality, as much at ease behind a camera as Henry Miller facing a blank page.” The mysteriously glowing box at the center of the film—a MacGuffin later commemorated in Repo Man (1984) and Pulp Fiction (1994)—is a sharp, if unsubtle, manifestation of 1950s nuclear anxiety. It’s a fitting image for a movie so explosive.
8. The Maltese Falcon (1941, dir. John Huston)
Hollywood had adapted Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel twice before but, as the saying goes, the third try’s a charm. The Maltese Falcon is a noir joyride. The detective thriller moves with the nimbleness of a master thief, sliding into scenes, executing the job with precision, and getting on to the next one before anyone is the wiser. It marked an astonishingly self-assured debut for writer-director John Huston, who completed filming under budget in 34 days. Humphrey Bogart became a bona fide movie star as hardboiled San Francisco private eye Sam Spade, drawn into the shadowy shenanigans of the most colorful rogues’ gallery this side of a comic book. Their quest: to swipe a priceless statuette of the titular black bird. The cast of Warner Bros. regulars—including Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Elisha Cook Jr.—is, to borrow the film’s closing line, the stuff that dreams are made of. “The picture was a completely new conception of the ‘gangster movie,’” gushed Astor in her memoir. “It was the story not of hoodlums, but of a group of evil though intelligent people playing for very high stakes.” Astor might have been biased, since she and Huston had an affair during the production. She happens to be right, though. Huston’s adaptation preserves Hammett’s snappy dialogue, delivered at a fast clip by some of the most watchable character actors of their day.
7. Sunset Boulevard (1950, dir. Billy Wilder)
When Billy Wilder and his writing partner Charles Brackett first drafted what became Sunset Boulevard, among the first images they wanted was that of a dead body floating in a pool: death in paradise. But they went further by making that corpse the narrator and, thus, the audience’s point of entry. The darkly comic story of Hollywood narcissism and cruelty features Gloria Swanson—herself once a star of the silent screen—as an aging silent-film queen Norma Desmond. The similarities between the actress and her character ended there, although Swanson, whose performance earned an Oscar nomination, bemoaned that audiences confused the two. Swanson is a wild-eyed, nostril-flaring force of nature as the reclusive star lost in a reverie of past glories that are kept alive by her faithful butler (Erich von Stroheim). Their hermetically sealed universe is upended when Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, stumbles onto Norma’s decaying mansion while outrunning creditors. In the withering cynicism of Sunset Boulevard, Wilder, Brackett and co-writer D.M. Marshman Jr. determined the movie business itself deserved its close-up. Hollywood is the film’s ultimate femme fatale.
6. In a Lonely Place (1950, dir. Nicholas Ray
Dixon “Dix” Steele is one of noir’s most fascinating antiheroes. The talented screenwriter is smart, charming and loyal to his friends. But Dix is also prone to bouts of uncontrollable, blind rage. Seemingly anything can set him off, from a pang of jealousy to piqued pride. Director Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew P. Solt navigate the psychology of self-destruction that fuels In a Lonely Place. Humphrey Bogart is arguably never better as Dix, who Los Angeles police suspect of strangling a hat-check girl (played by Martha Stewart) last seen at his apartment. His only alibi is a neighbor, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame, the director’s wife). The neighbors strike up a quick, passionate romance, even while Dix remains LAPD’s prime murder suspect and Laurel catches frightening glimpses of his temper. “You knew he was dynamite,” she is told by Dix’s long-suffering manager (Art Smith). “He has to explode sometimes.” Ray conceded the film came from a personal place. His marriage to Grahame was falling apart, and he wondered (incorrectly, it turned out) if casting her could salvage their relationship. They separated during the shoot, prompting Ray to consider changing the movie’s ending. “Ray fought the urge to kill the fictional character his wife was playing,” writes biographer Patrick McGilligan in Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director. “The idea was all the more unspeakable considering how much he loathed Grahame at the moment.” The marriage dissolved shortly after production ended, but the film endures as a classic of the genre.
5. The Third Man (1949, dir. Carol Reed)
This British noir from director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene is lean, compact and smart—in short, masterful storytelling. Set in postwar Vienna, The Third Man conveys the moral vacuity of a city gripped by black-market profiteers. Every camera movement, shot and edit feels designed to accentuate the locale’s claustrophobia and sense of peril. You can tell this is a movie that has been fussed over, but in a good way. Its biggest gamble, it seems to me, is the zither-centric score by Anton Karas, whom the filmmakers discovered performing in a Vienna café during production. The music is strange, but evocative and, somehow, perfect. Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, who comes to Vienna for a job promised by his childhood friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles). But damn the luck—Holly arrives just in time to learn Harry was struck down by a car and is about to be buried. But Holly can tell something doesn’t add up, and his suspicions are only heightened at Harry’s funeral by mourners who practically have the word “disreputable” flashing in neon signs floating above their heads. Sure enough, Harry is alive. Holly spies him standing in a darkened doorway that is suddenly illuminated by a shaft of light from a nearby window. It’s one of the most memorable entrances ever filmed. But cinematographer Robert Krasker makes every frame of The Third Man a work of black-and-white art. The cast is strong, particularly Trevor Howard as a flinty British lawman determined to nab Harry for stealing desperately needed penicillin from military hospitals. It’s a racket that has killed children, but Harry is untroubled. “The dead are happy dead,” he tells Holly. “They don’t miss much, poor devils.” The sentiment encapsulates the Vienna of The Third Man.
4. The Big Sleep (1946, dir. Howard Hawks)
The superbly entertaining The Big Sleep punches all the noir sweet spots: the stench of corruption and danger, a smoky-eyed femme fatale, a protagonist hanging on to a moral code in an otherwise immoral universe, and stunning black-and-white interplay of shadows. An adaptation of the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel, it stars Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe, a Los Angeles private eye hired by the wealthy and aging Colonel Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to deal with a blackmailer. The Big Sleep’s big draw is its scintillating dialogue—the screenwriting dream team included William Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett—particularly the sexually charged banter between Bogie and Lauren Bacall as the colonel’s oldest daughter. The onscreen chemistry mirrored what was happening off screen, as the pair were having an affair which began with 1944’s To Have and Have Not (Bogart and Bacall had married by the time of The Big Sleep’s release). Their spicy rapport is only part of the appeal. Bogart, clad in a trench coat and fedora, exudes noir cool. No wonder the movie’s L.A. seems populated by beautiful women eager to throw themselves at the gumshoe. If the plot is a bit byzantine, no worries. The confusing narrative even tripped up Hawks and the writers; they reportedly lost track of who committed one of the murders, that of the Sternwood chauffeur. Hawks even telegrammed Chandler to find out, but, as the director told movie scholar Joseph McBride, even the author didn’t know. “Actually, we didn’t care,” Hawks said. “It was the first time I made a picture and just decided I wasn’t going to explain things. I was just going to try and make good scenes.” Mission accomplished.
3. Sweet Smell of Success (1957, dir. Alexander Mackendrick)
In Sweet Smell of Success, gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) finds the perfect metaphor to sum up Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), an obsequious press agent willing to do anything to land a client’s name in Hunsecker’s column: “You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” That line also describes this noir gem. A thinly disguised takedown of Walter Winchell—a leading media demagogue of his time—Sweet Smell of Success savages a particularly sociopathic strain of American success. The script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets is sharp enough to sever the jugular, while director Alexander Mackendrick is nimble enough to catch the blood before it splatters the pavement. The picture is a feast of quotable dialogue. Meanwhile, ace cinematographer James Wong Howe showcases New York City’s seamy side in atmospheric black and white. Lancaster, here sporting thick glasses and a drop-dead glare, embodies icy rage. He’s also a wee bit too protective of kid sister Susie (Susan Harrison), who is being romanced by Martin Milner as the world’s whitest, most clean-cut jazz player. If Lancaster is chilly, then Curtis is pure volatility as Falco. Up to this point, Curtis had been another nondescript pretty boy traipsing through sword-and-sandals epics, but Sweet Smell of Success proved he could act even without a toga. Falco says of his scheme to break up the Susie Hunsecker romance and thereby demonstrate his allegiance to J.J.: “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”
2. Double Indemnity (1944, dir. Billy Wilder)
An adaptation of the James M. Cain potboiler, Double Indemnity is the definitive film noir that helped codify the genre and its postwar fascination with obsession, cynicism, fatalism and sex. Cinematographer John Seitz’s shadowy lighting, reminiscent of German Expressionism, proved hugely influential. As horny-but-dumb insurance salesman Walter Neff, Fred MacMurray all but salivates on his suit once he gets a good look at Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck, pitch-perfect), a blonde femme fatale whose wedding ring interests Walter less than her “honey of an anklet.” Within minutes of his insurance sales pitch, the two are engaged in some of cinema’s all-time tastiest sexual innuendo. In short order, the pair become lovers and kill Phyllis’ husband so she can pocket his life insurance policy. But something about Mr. Dietrichson’s death doesn’t add up for insurance claims manager—and Walter’s friend—Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). To punch up the dialogue, Billy Wilder brought in hardboiled crime novelist Raymond Chandler, creator of detective Philip Marlowe (see #4’s The Big Sleep). The collaboration was an unhappy one. The two did not get along, and Chandler’s productivity often ended with him drinking himself unconscious. Wilder reportedly drew upon the experience as inspiration for his next picture, The Lost Weekend, about a desperate alcoholic. Chandler was just as unamused. Shortly after the production, the writer told his British publisher that the collaboration with Wilder “was an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life, but I learned from it about as much about screenwriting as I am capable of learning, which is not very much.” As sometimes happens, the antipathy translated into a work of deep cynicism and desire.
1. Touch of Evil (1958, dir. Orson Welles)
Behold film noir at its most deliriously seamy. Orson Welles punches up his mastery of cinematic language—camera movement, composition, lighting, music, performance—to nearly operatic levels, all in service of rolling around in B-movie muck. The genius behind Citizen Kane, the guy who was staging Shakespeare at age 18, enjoys a good walk on the wild side, too. Touch of Evil also stars Welles—obese, jowly, constantly chewing on candy bars—as Hank Quinlan, a thoroughly corrupt police captain on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexican border. His nemesis: Charlton Heston, arguably Hollywood’s least-convincing actor to play a crusading Mexican prosecutor. The nominally simple plot concerns Quinlan’s investigation of a car bombing shortly after crossing into the U.S. Vargas is suspicious of Quinlan’s zeal to pin the crime on a Mexican. Touch of Evil is sleazy, magnificently so, ginned up on its own depravity. The cast is an embarrassment of riches. Akim Tamiroff is a toupee-sporting worm of a baddie; Dennis Weaver takes nervous anxiety to Lynchian heights; Janet Leigh can fill out a bra like no one’s business; Joseph Calleia is Quinlan’s disillusioned number two man, and Mercedes McCambridge is terrifically over the top as a dope-smoking, lesbian biker. But the greatest performer is Welles in the director’s chair. From oblique camera angles and intricate sound design to at least three virtuoso scenes in single traveling shots—including a justly famous opening tracking shot that follows the car bomb from it being planted to explosion—Touch of Evil is the work of someone who wants to dazzle you. And he succeeds.
Honorable mention: Act of Violence (1949, dir. Fred Zinnemann), The Breaking Point (1950, dir. Michael Curtiz), Crime Wave (1953, dir. André de Toth), Criss Cross (1949, dir. Robert Siodmak), D.O.A. (1949, dir. Rudolph Maté), Elevator to the Gallows (1958, dir. Louis Malle), Gilda (1946, dir. Charles Vidor), The Hitch-Hiker (1953, dir. Ida Lupino), The Lady from Shanghai (1947, dir. Orson Welles), Laura (1944, dir. Otto Preminger), Leave Her to Heaven (1945, dir. John M. Stahl), Mildred Pierce (1945, dir. Michael Curtiz), Night and the City (1950, dir. Jules Dassin), Out of the Past (1947, dir. Jacques Tourneur), Pickup on South Street (1953, dir. Samuel Fuller) The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, dir. Tay Garnett), Scarlet Street (1945, dir. Fritz Lang), The Set-Up (1949, dir. Robert Wise), Thieves’ Highway (1949, dir. Jules Dassin), White Heat (1949, dir. Raoul Walsh)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 