Film Noir Trivia
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98 free Film Noir trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 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
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.
Q 02Hollywood's classic film noir cycle began during which war?
World War II
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.
Q 03Which word, now tied to tearful romances, did 1940s reviewers routinely use for hard-edged crime films?
Melodrama
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.
Q 04Which 2005 film, shot in stark black and white with splashes of colour, adapts Frank Miller's noir comics?
Sin City
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.
Q 05Noir's shadowy visual style has its roots in which artistic movement?
German Expressionism
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.
Q 06Which 1931 Fritz Lang film about a child murderer is seen as an early fusion of noir style and plot?
M
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.
Q 07Which 1941 film, though not itself a noir, had perhaps the greatest influence on the genre's development?
Citizen Kane
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.
Q 08Which literary school was the primary influence on film noir?
Hardboiled crime fiction
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.
Q 09Whose novels became Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice?
James M. Cain
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.
Q 10Whose novels were adapted into The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key?
Dashiell Hammett
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.
Q 11Noir writer Cornell Woolrich wrote the short story behind which Alfred Hitchcock film?
Rear Window
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.
Q 12Which 1940 RKO B-picture is most commonly cited as the first true film noir?
Stranger on the Third Floor
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.
Q 13Which 1946 Howard Hawks noir is so tangled that even Raymond Chandler couldn't say who killed the chauffeur?
Q 21Which 1945 Fritz Lang noir was temporarily banned by censors in New York State, Milwaukee and Atlanta?
Scarlet Street
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.
Q 22Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948) was noted for which approach, inspired by Italian neorealism?
Documentary-style location shooting
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.
Q 23Which noir actress was the only woman directing Hollywood features for much of the 1950s?
The Big Sleep
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.
Q 14Who played Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941)?
Humphrey Bogart
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.
Q 15What was the name of Barbara Stanwyck's femme fatale in Double Indemnity?
Phyllis Dietrichson
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?'
Q 16Which actress played the title 'bad girl' in Gilda (1946)?
Rita Hayworth
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.
Q 17Which 1955 film ends with the 'great whatsit' revealed as a case of glowing radioactive material?
Kiss Me Deadly
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.
Q 18Which 1958 Orson Welles film is frequently cited as the last noir of the classic period?
Touch of Evil
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.
Q 19Which director made the 1944 noir Laura and returned to the form with Fallen Angel and Angel Face?
Otto Preminger
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.
Q 20Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951) are noirs satirising what?
Hollywood and the news media
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.
Ida Lupino
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.
Q 24Which cult 1945 noir did Edgar G. Ulmer direct for the Poverty Row studio PRC?
Detour
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.
Q 25Gun Crazy (1950) is famous for a bank hold-up filmed how?
In one unbroken take
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.
Q 26The Killers (1946) marked the screen debut of which star?
Burt Lancaster
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.
Q 27Which cinematographer, author of the manual Painting with Light, shot the noirs T-Men and The Big Combo?
John Alton
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.
Q 28Which 1947 Jacques Tourneur noir stars Robert Mitchum as a former detective and Jane Greer as the woman he tracked down?
Out of the Past
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.
Q 29Which 1949 Raoul Walsh noir climaxes with an explosion at a chemical plant?
White Heat
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.
Q 30Lady in the Lake (1947) is remarkable for being shot how?
Entirely from Philip Marlowe's point of view
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.