Over the years I have become a film noir, film gris, fanatic thanks to Turner Classic Movies (TCM) – especially viewing the TCM Noir Alley weekly feature hosted by the incomparable Eddie Muller (The Czar of Noir) and the Internet Archive noir collection. To me, the darker, more hard boiled, more morally ambivalent or subversive, the better. The brief brilliantly edited video above, The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir, captures the world-weary, fatalistic essence of film noir.

Here are a dozen very different examples of classic film noir — The Third Man; Out of the Past;  The Long Night; Detour; Thieves’ Highway; Force of Evil; Too Late For Tears; The Killing; Double Indemnity; The Killers; The Big Sleep; and Brute Force. Here are more of my favorites, many of which can be viewed free online here and here.

To newcomers of this genre, I recommend two excellent books on film noir. They are The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, by Foster Hirsch; and Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, by Eddie Muller. Many noirs were directed, produced, written by, or starred persons who were latter blacklisted by the major Hollywood studios. Along with the western, this is perhaps the most American of film genres.

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