American Noir Film: From ‘The Maltese Falcon’ to ‘Gone Girl’

This compact history of Hollywood noir films from the 1940s through today discusses the nature of the genre and how it’s changed over time, then moves to the analysis of specific movies. Movies are grouped into three subsets—detective films, lost-man films, and femme-fatale films—across the variant forms of noir, neo-noir, and revisionary noir. The earliest film discussed is The Maltese Falcon (1941); the most recent is 2020’s Promising Young Woman. Booker (“Mad Men”: A Cultural History) posits that classic noir’s shadowy style was indebted to German Expressionist films of the 1920s and ’30s and constrained by war economies and the restrictions imposed by a puritanical Production Code. With the mid-1950s came changes in audience tastes and the ascendancy of color over black and white film. Neo-noir emerged in the ’60s and ran through the ’90s, with many revisionary noir titles appearing in the 21st century, retaining classic noir’s unforgivingly pessimistic view of society but incorporating elements from other movie genres, playing games with them, and posing new questions.