As silent films gave way to "talkies," the detective story became very popular. Characters in 1930's cinema, such as Nick and Nora Charles, Charlie Chan, and Sherlock Holmes paved the way for their successors. With the 1940's arrived the emergence of a new genre of film. You take a man, turn him into some form of a hero, add a femme fatale, stir in a mysterious plot, complete with convolutions and turns, add a pinch of cynicism and let it cook. When it's done, you have a "film noir." .
Classic film noir has many characteristics. The most important of these is the role of the protagonist. In early noir, this role was usually played as a hard-nosed man of the streets who "used his fists as often as his wits." Other characteristics of film noir are plot twists, razor-sharp dialogue, dark or cynical characters, and moody lighting. Film noir was in its prime from the early 1940's until the mid-1950's. .
Essentially, film noir was born in 1941 with the release of John Huston's directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon. This film is widely accepted as the first bona fide film noir. Humphrey Bogart, fresh from playing gangsters in B movies, portrayed private detective Sam Spade, a devil-may-care-cut-him-and-he-bleeds-ice-water, type of man. Early in the film, after his partner is killed, about which he barely batted an eye, he has the dead man's desk removed from the office and his name expunged from the door. It's barely 20 minutes into the movie, and we already see that not only did Spade not particularly like his partner, but he is a cold, hard man. .
The femme fatale, played by Mary Astor, pathologically lies to Spade about her reasons for first, wanting to find a certain man, and then her part in the search for the mythical Maltese falcon. There are other characters- a shifty man in a trench coat, a fat, rich man willing to pay through the nose for the falcon, an odd little foreign man carrying a scented handkerchief and two police officers who want answers and are continuously held at bay by Bogart's quick-witted fabrications.
