98 Fun Facts About Film Noir

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

Nino Frank, an Italian-born critic writing in Paris, coined the usage in a 1946 essay on Hollywood crime films; the Série noire paperback imprint, launched by Gallimard in 1945, likely inspired the label.

Hollywood's classic film noir cycle began during which war?

World War II was under way when the cycle began around 1940; the war also kept these films out of occupied France until 1946, when critics there saw several years' worth at once and gave them their name.

Which word, now tied to tearful romances, did 1940s reviewers routinely use for hard-edged crime films?

Melodrama was an everyday label for crime pictures and thrillers in the 1940s, when nobody in Hollywood spoke of film noir; that name came from French critics and caught on in America only decades later.

Which 2005 film, shot in stark black and white with splashes of colour, adapts Frank Miller's noir comics?

Sin City was directed by Robert Rodriguez together with Miller himself; when the Directors Guild of America refused to allow the shared credit, Rodriguez resigned from the guild rather than drop Miller's name.

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

German Expressionism, the 1920s cinema of stark shadows and distorted sets seen in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, reached Hollywood with émigré directors and cinematographers fleeing Europe in the 1930s.

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

M makes its protagonist a child murderer hunted by the police and by the city's criminals, whose rackets the police raids are ruining; its star Peter Lorre left Germany when the Nazis took power and became a Hollywood noir regular.

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

Citizen Kane is not a noir, but its deep-focus, low-key photography by Gregg Toland and its flashback structure built on conflicting testimony shaped dozens of classic noirs that followed.

Which literary school was the primary influence on film noir?

Hardboiled crime fiction, the tough, cynical American school that grew up in 1920s pulp magazines such as Black Mask, supplied noir's plots, private eyes and clipped dialogue.

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

James M. Cain wrote all three; he based Double Indemnity on the 1927 case of Ruth Snyder, who had her husband killed for the insurance money, after attending her trial as a New York journalist.

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

Dashiell Hammett wrote both after years as a Pinkerton operative, experience he drew on for his fiction; the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing lifts scenes and lines from The Glass Key.

Noir writer Cornell Woolrich wrote the short story behind which Alfred Hitchcock film?

Rear Window grew out of Woolrich's 1942 story 'It Had to Be Murder'; a later fight over that story's rights went to the US Supreme Court, which sided with its owner against the film's makers in 1990.

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

Stranger on the Third Floor, with Peter Lorre top-billed, was no event in 1940: Variety called it too arty for average audiences, and only decades later was it singled out as the first true noir.

Which 1946 Howard Hawks noir is so tangled that even Raymond Chandler couldn't say who killed the chauffeur?

The Big Sleep baffled its own makers: mid-shoot they wired Chandler to ask whether chauffeur Owen Taylor was murdered or killed himself, and the novelist later admitted he didn't know either.

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

Humphrey Bogart played Sam Spade in John Huston's directing debut, after George Raft turned the part down; the role began Bogart's run as noir's defining leading man.

What was the name of Barbara Stanwyck's femme fatale in Double Indemnity?

Phyllis Dietrichson talks salesman Walter Neff into killing her husband for the insurance; Stanwyck was afraid to play an out-and-out killer until Billy Wilder asked her, 'Are you a mouse or an actress?'

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

Rita Hayworth's Gilda caused such a stir that the atomic bomb dropped in the first Bikini Atoll test of July 1946 was named Gilda and was widely reported to carry her picture.

Which 1955 film ends with the 'great whatsit' revealed as a case of glowing radioactive material?

Kiss Me Deadly sends Mickey Spillane's detective Mike Hammer after a case that is hot to the touch; when it is finally opened, its glowing contents set the beach house ablaze.

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

Touch of Evil was re-edited by Universal against Welles's wishes; in 1998 editor Walter Murch recut the film to follow the 58-page memo of changes Welles had sent the studio.

Which director made the 1944 noir Laura and returned to the form with Fallen Angel and Angel Face?

Otto Preminger began Laura only as its producer; he took over as director when studio chief Darryl Zanuck removed Rouben Mamoulian early in the shoot, and the film made his name.

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

Hollywood and the news media: Sunset Boulevard skewers a faded silent star and the studio system, while Ace in the Hole follows a reporter who drags out the rescue of a man trapped in a cave to keep his story running.

Which 1945 Fritz Lang noir was temporarily banned by censors in New York State, Milwaukee and Atlanta?

Scarlet Street lets Edward G. Robinson's meek cashier get away with murder while another man is executed for it; that dark plot, laced with erotic innuendo, made it one of the few classic noirs to be officially censored.

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

Documentary-style location shooting put real New York streets and crowds on screen; the closing line, 'There are eight million stories in the naked city', lived on in the television series the film inspired.

Which noir actress was the only woman directing Hollywood features for much of the 1950s?

Ida Lupino first directed by accident, taking over Not Wanted in 1949 when Elmer Clifton had a heart attack; her 1953 thriller The Hitch-Hiker is the only classic-period noir directed by a woman.

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

Detour was long said to have been shot in six days, as Ulmer claimed, though a script page his daughter later produced records 14 camera days; in 1992 it was chosen for the National Film Registry.

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

In one unbroken take, the camera stays with the couple as they drive into town, hold up the bank and speed away; the script was secretly the work of blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, credited to a front.

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

Burt Lancaster, a former circus acrobat, made his debut as the doomed 'Swede'; Hemingway's story supplies only the first twelve minutes, and the rest of the plot was invented for the film.

Which cinematographer, author of the manual Painting with Light, shot the noirs T-Men and The Big Combo?

John Alton pushed low-key lighting to extremes for directors Anthony Mann and Joseph H. Lewis, yet this master of darkness won his Oscar for the Technicolor ballet of An American in Paris.

Which 1947 Jacques Tourneur noir stars Robert Mitchum as a former detective and Jane Greer as the woman he tracked down?

Out of the Past, which scholar Robert Ottoson called 'the ne plus ultra of forties film noir', was remade in 1984 as Against All Odds, with Jane Greer cast as the mother of her original character.

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

White Heat ends with Cody Jarrett shouting 'Made it, Ma! Top of the world!' on a blazing gas tank; James Cagney had left Warner Bros. to make his own films and returned for this one, he admitted, because he needed the money.

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

Entirely from Philip Marlowe's point of view is how the story is shot: star and director Robert Montgomery appears only in mirrors and when addressing the audience, and MGM sold it as the most revolutionary film since the talkies.

Shadows of which object, cast across an actor or a whole set, became a visual cliché of film noir?

Venetian blinds throw the striped shadows noir is known for; in Double Indemnity, cinematographer John Seitz used them to suggest prison bars closing in on the characters.

In a Dutch angle, a noir staple, how is the camera set?

Tilted to one side, the camera makes the world look off balance; Carol Reed used the trick so often in The Third Man that, by his own account, William Wyler sent him a spirit level for his camera.

Which 1953 Technicolor thriller, with Marilyn Monroe plotting her husband's murder, is routinely listed as a film noir?

Niagara is one of the few colour films regularly counted as noir, alongside 1945's Leave Her to Heaven; with two comedies released the same year, it made Monroe one of Hollywood's most marketable stars.

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

Amnesia drives noirs such as Somewhere in the Night (1946), in which a wounded Marine who wakes with no memory hides his condition and sets out to trace the one name he has, Larry Cravat.

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

Miklós Rózsa scored all three; his harsh, dissonant music for Double Indemnity (1944) so offended Paramount's music director that Billy Wilder had to defend it, and it earned an Oscar nomination.

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

Rififi turns on a long jewel heist played without dialogue or music; the scene was so precise that some countries banned the film, Mexico doing so after burglars copied its methods.

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

Jean-Pierre Melville, born Grumbach, took the surname of Moby-Dick's author as his alias in the French Resistance and kept it; his spare crime films with Alain Delon include Le Samouraï and Le Cercle rouge.

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

Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog follows a detective hunting his stolen pistol through postwar Tokyo, and High and Low turns an Ed McBain kidnapping novel into a study of class; Drunken Angel and The Bad Sleep Well share the vein.

Which 1974 Roman Polanski neo-noir sends private eye Jake Gittes into a water conspiracy in 1930s Los Angeles?

Chinatown drew on the real California water wars, in which Los Angeles secured the water of the distant Owens Valley; Robert Towne's script won the film's only Oscar from eleven nominations.

Which 1995 Bryan Singer neo-noir is narrated by the con man Verbal Kint?

The Usual Suspects took its title from a magazine column named after Claude Rains's order in Casablanca to 'round up the usual suspects'; Kevin Spacey and writer Christopher McQuarrie both won Oscars.

Which 1981 neo-noir, Lawrence Kasdan's directing debut, stars William Hurt as a Florida lawyer drawn into murder?

Body Heat reworks Double Indemnity with Kathleen Turner in her film debut; George Lucas served as its uncredited executive producer, having hired Kasdan to write The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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

James Ellroy's 1990 novel, the third of his L.A. Quartet, was pared down by Hanson and Brian Helgeland into an Oscar-winning screenplay; the film keeps the early-1950s setting of corrupt LAPD detectives.

Which German-born director made the noirs Phantom Lady, The Killers and Criss Cross?

Robert Siodmak was born in Dresden; the story that he came from Memphis, Tennessee, was a fiction he needed to get a visa in wartime Paris. His breakthrough, People on Sunday, was co-written by Billy Wilder.

Which British noir, from a Graham Greene novel, stars Richard Attenborough as the teenage gangster Pinkie Brown?

Brighton Rock ends on a cruel mercy: the record Pinkie made to tell his bride he hates her sticks on the words 'I love you', so the grieving girl never hears the rest.

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

Park Chan-wook opened his Vengeance Trilogy with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; Thirst, which won the Cannes Jury Prize, moves Zola's Thérèse Raquin to Korea and makes the lover a priest who has become a vampire.

Which 1988 film sends private eye Eddie Valiant through a noir murder plot in 1947 Hollywood?

Who Framed Roger Rabbit rests its noir plot on real history: the villain's scheme to scrap the Red Car trolleys for a freeway echoes the dismantling of Los Angeles's streetcar network.

Which 1982 film, paying homage to classic noir, became a founding work of the cyberpunk genre?

Blade Runner's noir-style voiceover was written and inserted by its financiers after test audiences struggled to follow the story; Ridley Scott cut all of it from his 1992 Director's Cut.

Which Coen brothers film of 2001 is a black-and-white noir set in small-town California in 1949?

The Man Who Wasn't There stars Billy Bob Thornton as a laconic small-town barber drawn into blackmail and murder; Roger Deakins shot it in colour and printed it in black and white.

Which 1949 British thriller set in occupied Vienna pairs Orson Welles's Harry Lime with a famous zither score?

The Third Man turned zither player Anton Karas into an international star when its theme topped the music charts in 1950. He was an unknown Viennese performer until director Carol Reed heard him play.

Which director, still in his twenties, made the 1956 racetrack-heist noir The Killing with Sterling Hayden?

Stanley Kubrick wrote The Killing with pulp novelist Jim Thompson, adapting Lionel White's novel Clean Break. It was only his third feature as a director.

Which former MGM star won the Best Actress Oscar for playing the title role in Mildred Pierce?

Joan Crawford campaigned for a part most leading actresses did not want, because it meant playing the mother of a teenage daughter. It was her comeback after nearly two years off the screen.

Which real-life silent-era star played the faded movie queen Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard?

Gloria Swanson was a silent-era idol herself, and the old picture Norma screens for Joe is Swanson's own Queen Kelly from 1929. Its director, Erich von Stroheim, plays Norma's butler.

Which actor, later the dad on TV's My Three Sons, played insurance salesman Walter Neff in Double Indemnity?

Fred MacMurray was used to playing good guys in light comedies and told Billy Wilder the casting was the mistake of his life. Wilder pestered him until he gave in.

Which Hungarian-born actor played the crook Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon and Ugarte in Casablanca?

Peter Lorre worked so well opposite Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon that the pair made nine films together in all. In Casablanca, his small part supplies the stolen letters of transit.

Which screenwriter made his directing debut with The Maltese Falcon and later directed his own father to an Oscar?

John Huston chose The Maltese Falcon for his first directing job even though Warner Bros. had already filmed the novel twice. His version became a critical and commercial hit.

The 1946 noir The Killers expands a 1927 short story by which Nobel Prize-winning American novelist?

Ernest Hemingway's story fills only the first 12 minutes of The Killers, and the rest was invented for the screen. He usually loathed films of his work but openly admired this one.

Sam Spade runs his detective agency in The Maltese Falcon from which California city, also the setting of Dark Passage?

San Francisco also hides the fugitive of Dark Passage, who is smuggled into town after escaping San Quentin Prison in a laundry barrel.

Which jazz trumpeter improvised the score for Louis Malle's 1958 French noir Elevator to the Gallows?

Miles Davis brought his band to a Paris studio with nothing prepared, and they improvised the score in a single night while scenes from the film were projected for them.

Which 2000 Christopher Nolan neo-noir tells its colour scenes in reverse order to mirror its hero's memory loss?

Memento intercuts those backward scenes with a monochrome thread shown in chronological order, so the audience shares the hero's confusion about what has just happened.

Which 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger film features a nightclub named Tech Noir, a label now used for sci-fi noir?

The Terminator director James Cameron coined the phrase as the name of an underground club, and critics later adopted it for films that blend noir with science fiction.

Which comedian played private eye Rigby Reardon in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, a 1982 spoof built around old noir clips?

Steve Martin trades lines with stars of the 1940s, because the comedy splices clips from 19 vintage films into newly shot monochrome footage.

Which actress won an Oscar as Lynn Bracken, a call girl made up to resemble a film star, in L.A. Confidential?

Kim Basinger took Best Supporting Actress, one of only two wins from nine nominations for a film that lost every other category to Titanic.

Which star played Easy Rawlins, a laid-off veteran turned detective in 1948 Los Angeles, in Devil in a Blue Dress?

Denzel Washington's Easy has no badge or licence when the story starts: he agrees to find a missing woman only because he needs money for his mortgage.

Which actor plays the nameless stunt performer in a satin scorpion jacket in the 2011 neo-noir Drive?

Ryan Gosling's character is billed only as The Driver, a mechanic and stunt double who hires himself out to criminals for getaways.

Which 1995 David Fincher neo-noir follows two detectives hunting a killer who stages murders after the cardinal sins?

Seven kept its bleak finale because David Fincher agreed to direct only if the original script's ending stayed intact. He had been sent that draft by mistake.

Which 1986 David Lynch neo-noir begins when a college student finds a severed human ear in a field?

Blue Velvet's script was passed around for years, with several major studios declining it over its sexual and violent content.

Which newspaper comic strip spoofs noir whenever its six-year-old hero imagines himself as private eye Tracer Bullet?

Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson drew the Tracer Bullet stories in an elaborate, shadowy style, but only rarely, because the inking took so long.

Which crime novelist created the tough private eye Mike Hammer, who first appeared in I, the Jury?

Mickey Spillane became one of the best-selling authors of his era: I, the Jury alone sold six and a half million copies in the United States.

Which MGM star, nicknamed the Sweater Girl, played the scheming wife Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice?

Lana Turner's Cora is dressed entirely in white in all but three scenes, starting with her famous first entrance in the diner doorway.

Which English actor directed only one film, the 1955 thriller starring Robert Mitchum as a murderous preacher?

Charles Laughton directed only The Night of the Hunter, whose villain poses as a man of God to chase two children for $10,000 in stolen cash.

Which actress played the title role in Laura, the 1944 noir about a detective obsessed with a murder victim?

Gene Tierney was a relative newcomer when Laura was shot, yet the film now ranks fourth on the American Film Institute's list of the best mystery films.

Which Hollywood censorship rules, enforced from 1934, insisted that screen criminals be punished by the final reel?

The Hays Code meant no film character could literally get away with murder, so noir's schemers had to be caught, killed or shamed before the credits rolled.

Which Italian term from Renaissance painting describes the stark light-and-dark contrasts of noir cinematography?

Chiaroscuro on film comes from low-key lighting, which often uses a single key light with little or no fill, leaving much of the frame in darkness.

Which crooner of 1930s musicals reinvented himself as Philip Marlowe in the 1944 noir Murder, My Sweet?

Dick Powell's image was so musical that an audience survey found viewers took the original title, Farewell, My Lovely, for another song-and-dance picture, so the studio renamed it.

Which 1947 Orson Welles noir climaxes with a shootout in a funhouse hall of mirrors?

The Lady from Shanghai reached cinemas only after the studio's editor removed about an hour from Welles's rough cut, a job that took more than a year.

Which classic noir opens with a poisoned man walking into a police station to report his own murder?

D.O.A. gives its hero, a small-town accountant named Frank Bigelow, only days to live and one job: finding out who poisoned him and why.

Which director made the noirs They Live by Night and In a Lonely Place before Rebel Without a Cause?

Nicholas Ray's debut, They Live by Night, sat unreleased for more than a year while Howard Hughes took over the studio that made it.

Which actor earned an Oscar nomination for his 1947 screen debut as the giggling killer Tommy Udo?

Richard Widmark's most notorious scene has Udo push a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. The part also won him a Golden Globe as most promising newcomer.

Which star of the gangster classic Little Caesar played claims man Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity?

Edward G. Robinson hesitated to accept third billing, then agreed partly because he would earn the same salary as the two leads for fewer days of shooting.

Which actor was paired with Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key and The Blue Dahlia?

Alan Ladd suited Lake partly because of height: at 4 ft 11 in, she was one of the few Hollywood actresses substantially shorter than he was.

Which actress won an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful and is scalded with coffee in a 1953 Fritz Lang noir?

Gloria Grahame won that Oscar for little more than nine minutes on screen, for years the shortest performance ever to take an acting award.

Which 1960 Jean-Luc Godard film stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a car thief who idolises American movie gangsters?

Breathless was Godard's first feature, and it turned Belmondo, until then little known outside France, into an international name.

Which future Taxi Driver screenwriter argued in an influential 1972 essay that noir is defined by its tone?

Paul Schrader wrote that essay as a young critic, four years before his script about an obsessed New York cabbie reached the screen as Taxi Driver.

Which pulp magazine, launched by H. L. Mencken in 1920, published the tough detective stories that fed noir?

Black Mask was started purely to make money for a loss-making literary magazine, and its founders sold it after only eight issues.

Which 1984 neo-noir about a Texas bartender's affair with his boss's wife was the Coen brothers' directing debut?

Blood Simple takes its title from the 1929 novel Red Harvest, and it gave Frances McDormand her first screen role.

Which 1948 noir traps gangster Johnny Rocco and his hostages in a hotel as a hurricane closes in?

Key Largo won Claire Trevor an Oscar as the gangster's alcoholic companion, a faded nightclub singer named Gaye Dawn.

Which 1947 noir stars Tyrone Power as a scheming carnival barker who masters a fake mind-reading act?

Nightmare Alley exists because Power pushed his studio to buy the novel, hoping to escape the romantic and swashbuckling roles that had made him famous.

Which star produced and headlined the 1959 heist noir Odds Against Tomorrow through his own company?

Harry Belafonte chose blacklisted writer Abraham Polonsky for the script, so a novelist friend had to stand in as the credited screenwriter.

Which French director turned a David Goodis pulp novel into Shoot the Piano Player, his follow-up to The 400 Blows?

François Truffaut cast singer Charles Aznavour as the pianist and shaped the film as a tribute to American noir, a reaction to the very French hit that had made his name.

Which 1957 noir follows hustling press agent Sidney Falco doing dirty work for columnist J.J. Hunsecker?

Sweet Smell of Success modelled its ruthless columnist on the real gossip king Walter Winchell, and Tony Curtis had to fight his own studio to play Falco.

Which New York crime photographer's 1945 book Naked City lent its title and look to a 1948 Jules Dassin noir?

Weegee's Naked City was his first book of photographs, and its title lived on again in a television police drama.

Which director, a New York crime reporter at 17, made Pickup on South Street and Shock Corridor?

Samuel Fuller turned his tabloid years into pulp cinema: Pickup on South Street follows a pickpocket who unwittingly steals secret microfilm sought by foreign agents.

Which 1930s French film movement, starring Jean Gabin as its doomed heroes, is seen as a forerunner of noir?

Poetic realism was stylised and studio-bound rather than shot in real streets, and it went on to shape Italian neorealism and the French New Wave too.

Which Los Angeles landmark, famed for its skylit iron atrium, became a favourite location for classic noirs?

The Bradbury Building has a plain exterior, but inside is a five-storey court of ornate ironwork, open walkways and lifts beneath a glass roof.

Which director of Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire was named in 1947 as one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten?

Edward Dmytryk first joined the group's refusal to testify, then broke ranks in 1951 and named names to the committee to rebuild his own career.

Which 2005 neo-noir, Rian Johnson's directing debut, transplants a tough detective story to a California high school?

Brick stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a student who turns investigator after a pleading phone call from his ex-girlfriend. Johnson shot it in his own hometown, San Clemente.

Which radio humorist voiced the private eye Guy Noir in a recurring sketch on A Prairie Home Companion?

Garrison Keillor's detective worked from the twelfth floor of the Acme Building in St. Paul, in sketches packed with tongue-twisters and wordplay.

Which actor played a Philip Marlowe transplanted to the 1970s in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye?

Elliott Gould shares the film with an early, uncredited appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger, made years before the bodybuilder's own stardom.