Film noir refers to stylish Hollywood crime dramas from the 1940s-1950s that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. It is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style influenced by German Expressionism. Many noir stories and attitudes come from hardboiled crime fiction of the Depression era. While some films noir appeared earlier, Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) is often cited as the first true film noir, though it lost money for its studio despite a modest budget.

1. Film Noir

2. What is film noir? Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood, crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression.

3. Example of Film noir

4. Overview The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir. While City Streets and other pre-WWII crime melodramas such as Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once (1937), both directed by Fritz Lang, are categorized as full-fledged noir in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's film noir encyclopedia, other critics tend to describe them as "proto-noir" or in similar terms. The movie now most commonly cited as the first "true" film noir is Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), directed by Latvian-born, Soviet-trained Boris Ingster. Hungarian émigré Peter Lorre—who had starred in Lang's M —was top-billed, though he did not play the lead. He would play secondary roles in several other formative American noirs. Though modestly budgeted, at the high end of the B movie scale, Stranger on the Third Floor still lost its studio, RKO, $56,000, almost a third of its total cost. Variety magazine found Ingster's work "too studied and when original, lacks the flare to hold attention. It's a film too arty for average audiences, and too humdrum for others.“ ’ Stranger on the Third Floor was not recognized as the beginning of a trend, let alone a new genre, for many decades.

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