What Is Film Noir? Definition, Style and 10 Classic Examples

Humphrey Bogart made some of the greatest film noirs ever shot. He never called them that. Hardly anyone in 1940s Hollywood did. The studios sold these pictures as melodramas and crime thrillers.

The name came from Paris. In August 1946, a critic named Nino Frank watched four American crime films that the war had kept off French screens for years: The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Murder, My Sweet and Double Indemnity. He saw something new in them, dark and cynical and soaked in shadow, and he called them “films noirs.” The label didn’t catch on in America until the late 1960s and 1970s.

So what is film noir, exactly? This guide covers the definition, the look, the characters, 10 classic film noir movies and the neo-noirs that carried the style into color.

What Is Film Noir?

Film noir is a style of crime film built on shadows, moral rot and a feeling that the hero is already doomed. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a type of crime film featuring cynical malevolent characters in a sleazy setting and an ominous atmosphere that is conveyed by shadowy photography and foreboding background music.” The term is French, and it means “black film.”

The classic era runs from about 1941 to 1958. Most critics start with The Maltese Falcon (1941), which we cover in our guide to the MacGuffin, and end with Touch of Evil (1958). Some go back a year further to Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), an RKO B-movie that’s often called the first true noir.

Is film noir a genre or a style? Critics still argue about it. Paul Schrader settled it for a lot of people in his 1972 essay “Notes on Film Noir,” where he wrote that “film noir is not a genre.” A western is defined by its setting. A noir is defined by its tone and mood. That’s why a noir can be a detective story, a heist film, a gangster picture or a Hollywood drama.

Noir grew out of three things:

• Hardboiled crime fiction. The novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain gave noir its plots and its tough, clipped dialogue.
• German Expressionism. Directors who fled Europe, like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Robert Siodmak, brought a shadowy, theatrical style with them.
• Postwar unease. Veterans came home to a country that felt less certain than the one they left. Noir put that fear on screen.

The Look of Film Noir

You know a noir when you see one. The look comes down to a handful of choices:

• Low-key lighting. One hard light source, deep shadows and faces half lost in black. Our guide to low-key lighting shows how to set it up, and the opposite is high-key lighting.
• Venetian blind shadows. Light cut into bars across a wall or a face, so the hero looks trapped before the plot traps him.
• Odd angles. Low angles that make a villain loom, and tilted frames like the Dutch angle that make the world feel off balance.
• Night and rain. Wet streets, neon signs and cigarette smoke caught in the light.
• Cheap sets, hidden. Darkness saved money. Dim lighting cut the electric bill and hid sets that wouldn’t hold up in bright light.

Cinematographer John Alton was so good at this that he wrote a book about it, Painting with Light (1949). It was one of the first books written by a working Hollywood cinematographer. For the full toolkit, see our lighting guide.

Film Noir Characteristics

The look is only half of it. Noir has its own cast of characters and its own way of telling a story:

• The hardboiled detective or the man in trouble. Either a private eye who’s seen it all, or an ordinary guy who makes one bad choice. Many are close cousins of the anti-hero, and most are ruled by a character flaw.
• The femme fatale. The dangerous woman who leads the hero to ruin. She’s so central to noir that we wrote a full guide to the femme fatale.
• Voice-over and flashback. Many noirs start at the end, with the hero telling us how he got here. Double Indemnity opens with a dying man confessing into a Dictaphone.
• The city at night. Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, shot as places where everyone has an angle.
• Fate. In noir, the past always catches up with you.

There was one rule every noir had to follow. Under the Hays Code, no character could get away with murder. That’s why so many noirs end in a hail of bullets or a prison cell.

10 Classic Film Noir Movies

These 10 classic film noir movies count down from a cheap road thriller to the film many critics call the purest noir ever made. Every entry shows a different side of the style, from detectives to heists to Broadway.

10) Detour (1945)

A broke piano player hitchhikes to Hollywood and picks up a dead man’s identity on the way.

Al Roberts, played by Tom Neal, is hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles when a bookie named Haskell gives him a ride. Haskell dies in a freak accident in the rain. Sure no one will believe him, Al hides the body and drives on in the dead man’s car. Then he picks up Vera, played by Ann Savage, who knew the real Haskell and starts blackmailing him on the spot.

Detour was made at PRC, one of the cheapest studios in Hollywood. For years the legend said Ulmer shot it in six days for about $20,000. The studio’s own ledger tells a different story: about 18 days and a final cost of $117,226.80. That’s still tiny. It runs 68 minutes and is now one of the most respected films on this list.

9) Laura (1944)

A detective falls in love with a murdered woman through her portrait.

Detective Mark McPherson, played by Dana Andrews, investigates the shotgun murder of Laura Hunt, a rising advertising executive. He questions her mentor, the acid columnist Waldo Lydecker, and her shifty fiancé. The more he reads her letters and stares at her portrait, the harder he falls for her. Then one night Laura, played by Gene Tierney, walks into her apartment alive.

Laura almost didn’t happen this way. Rouben Mamoulian started as director, and the studio replaced him. Preminger took over and threw out the sets, the costumes and the footage. Joseph LaShelle won the Oscar for the cinematography, and David Raksin’s theme became a hit song.

8) The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

A crew of professionals pulls off a perfect jewel robbery, then falls apart one by one.

Just out of prison, the master planner Doc Riedenschneider, played by Sam Jaffe, puts together a crew for a big jewel job. Sterling Hayden plays Dix Handley, the muscle who dreams of buying back his family’s Kentucky horse farm. A crooked lawyer plans to cheat them all. The break-in plays out in near silence, then an alarm, a dropped gun and a double-cross pull the whole thing apart.

The long, quiet robbery became the blueprint for the heist film. It shaped Rififi, The Killing and decades of films after them. Huston also gave a small early part to a young Marilyn Monroe as the lawyer’s mistress. Dix’s last scene, in a Kentucky field with the horses gathering around him, is one of the saddest endings in noir.

7) White Heat (1949)

A violent gangster with a mother fixation is the target of an undercover agent planted in his cell.

Cody Jarrett, played by James Cagney, robs a mail train and then confesses to a smaller crime to get a short prison stretch and an alibi. The Treasury Department plants an undercover agent, Hank Fallon, in his cell. Fallon wins Cody’s trust by saving his life. Outside, Cody’s wife and his rival take over the gang, and his wife secretly kills Ma.

The prison mess hall scene, where Cody learns his mother is dead, is one of the great breakdowns in film. Cagney’s scream wasn’t rehearsed with the 600 extras, so their shock is real. The ending on top of a gas tank gave AFI its number 18 movie quote. Most people misquote it as “Top of the world, Ma!”

6) In a Lonely Place (1950)

A Hollywood screenwriter with a violent temper becomes the prime suspect in a murder.

Dix Steele, played by Humphrey Bogart, is a washed-up screenwriter with a famous short fuse. He takes a hat-check girl home to tell him the plot of a book he’s supposed to adapt. The next morning she’s found dead. His new neighbor, Laurel, played by Gloria Grahame, gives him an alibi, and they fall in love. Then his rages start to scare her.

This is noir with no gangsters and no gold, just a man and his temper. In the novel, Dix is the killer. The film makes him innocent, which is somehow worse. Ray shot the scripted ending, where Dix kills Laurel, and threw it out. He improvised the ending we have now on a closed set with Bogart, Grahame and Art Smith. Ray and Grahame were secretly separating during the shoot.

5) The Big Heat (1953)

An honest cop loses everything and goes after the mob alone.

When a police officer kills himself, Sgt. Dave Bannion, played by Glenn Ford, asks the questions his bosses want left alone. A car bomb meant for him kills his wife. Bannion is suspended, hands in his badge and goes after the crime boss and his sadistic enforcer, Vince Stone, played by Lee Marvin. Stone’s girlfriend Debby, played by Gloria Grahame, becomes the key to bringing them down.

The most famous scene is also the most brutal. Stone throws a pot of boiling coffee in Debby’s face. Lang kept the moment of impact off camera, which makes it hit harder. Columbia wanted Marilyn Monroe for Debby but wouldn’t pay Fox’s fee, so Grahame got the part and gave one of the best performances in noir.

4) The Big Sleep (1946)

Philip Marlowe takes a simple blackmail case and walks into a maze of murders.

A dying general hires Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, to deal with a bookseller who’s blackmailing him over his wild younger daughter. Before long there’s a chain of killings, a gambler named Eddie Mars and a missing man nobody wants found. Through it all, Marlowe trades barbs and then falls for the older daughter, Vivian, played by Lauren Bacall.

The plot is famously hard to follow. During filming, someone asked who killed the Sternwood chauffeur, and nobody knew. They wired Chandler. In a 1949 letter, Chandler admitted “dammit I didn’t know either.” Warner Bros. shelved the first cut, then reshot about 20 minutes in 1946 to add more Bogart and Bacall. The original 1945 cut was restored in 1997.

3) Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

A desperate press agent will do anything to stay in a powerful columnist’s good graces.

J.J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster, is the most powerful gossip columnist on Broadway. He wants his sister’s romance with a jazz guitarist destroyed. Sidney Falco, played by Tony Curtis, is a hungry press agent who will do the dirty work to stay on J.J.’s good side. A planted smear, planted drugs and a crooked cop follow.

Nobody dies in Sweet Smell of Success, and it’s still one of the darkest films of the 1950s. James Wong Howe shot it on the streets of midtown Manhattan at night, in hard black and white. Mackendrick reportedly smeared Vaseline on Lancaster’s glasses for a dead-eyed stare. It flopped on release and is now a classic, with lines like “You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

2) Touch of Evil (1958)

A Mexican narcotics officer on his honeymoon catches a famous American detective planting evidence.

A car bomb goes off just as Mike Vargas, played by Charlton Heston, crosses the border with his new wife, Susie, played by Janet Leigh. The local police captain, Hank Quinlan, played by Welles himself, is a legend in town. Vargas catches him planting dynamite on a suspect. Quinlan teams up with a local crime boss to bring Vargas down, and Susie becomes the target.

The film opens with one of the most famous shots in movie history: one unbroken crane shot that follows a bomb through the streets of a border town. Universal took the film away from Welles, cut about 15 minutes and added new scenes. Welles answered with a 58-page memo. In 1998, editor Walter Murch re-cut the film to follow that memo. Touch of Evil is usually called the last noir of the classic era.

1) Out of the Past (1947)

A small-town gas station owner can’t outrun the private eye he used to be, or the woman he used to love.

Jeff Bailey, played by Robert Mitchum, runs a gas station in a California mountain town. Then one of gambler Whit Sterling’s men drives up. On the road to Lake Tahoe, Jeff tells his girlfriend the truth. Years ago, as private eye Jeff Markham, he was hired to find Kathie Moffat, who had shot Whit and run off with $40,000. He found her in Acapulco, fell for her and ran away with her.

Out of the Past has everything that makes a noir: the trench coat, the flashback, the voice-over, the doomed hero and one of the great femme fatales in Jane Greer’s Kathie. Nicholas Musuraca lit the cigarette smoke so it glows in the dark. Roger Ebert called it the greatest cigarette-smoking movie ever made. It’s the purest film noir there is.

Here’s when each of the 10 came out, and how they fit into the history of the style.

Six of the 10 came out in the five years after World War II ended. All 10 are now in the National Film Registry. Only Laura won an Oscar, for its cinematography, which says a lot about how the style was valued at the time and how much it’s valued now.

Neo-Noir: Film Noir in Color

When the classic era ended, the style didn’t die. It went into color and got darker. Neo-noir means any film made after the classic period that carries noir’s themes and mood. The Hays Code ended in 1968, and the films that followed could finally let the bad guy win.

These neo-noir movies are a good place to start:

• Chinatown (1974): Jack Nicholson as a 1930s private eye in a Los Angeles water scandal. It earned 11 Oscar nominations and won for Robert Towne’s screenplay. We cover its famous misdirection in our guide to the red herring.
• Blade Runner (1982): Noir moved to the future. Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles of 2019 is all rain, neon and smoke, and the original cut even has a hardboiled voice-over.
• L.A. Confidential (1997): James Ellroy’s 1953 Los Angeles, full of corrupt cops. Kim Basinger won an Oscar for playing a call girl made up to look like Veronica Lake.
• Sin City (2005): Shot mostly in black and white, with single splashes of color, straight from Frank Miller’s comics.
• Drive (2011): A getaway driver who barely speaks. Nicolas Winding Refn won Best Director at Cannes for it.
• The Batman (2022): Matt Reeves called it a noir from Batman’s point of view, with Chinatown as one of his models. Batman even narrates.

Even superhero TV went noir. Spider-Noir (2026), the Nicolas Cage series on MGM+ and Prime Video, lets viewers choose black and white or color.

How to Shoot a Noir Scene on a Budget

Detour proves you don’t need money to make a noir. You need shadows. Here’s how to get the look:

1. Use one hard light and let the rest go black. Put your key light to the side and leave the fill off. Our low-key lighting guide walks through the setup.
2. Break up the light. Shine your light through blinds, a window frame or a piece of cut cardboard to throw bars and patterns across the wall.
3. Wet it down. Spray the street or the floor before you shoot at night. Wet surfaces catch every light in the frame. Add smoke or haze so the beam shows up in the air.

FAQs About Film Noir

The Final Cut on Film Noir

Film noir is a style of crime film defined by hard shadows, cynical heroes and doomed endings. It ran from about 1941 to 1958, got its name from a French critic, and never really went away. You can see it in Chinatown, Blade Runner and The Batman, and you can shoot it yourself with one light.

Which noir would you show someone who has never seen one? And what would you light, and what would you leave in the dark?

For more on the craft behind it, see our guides to low-key lighting, the anti-hero and cinematography.