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Image by Britt Fuller and Arthur Rothstein

https://www.flickr.com/photos/157979053@N04/42138134964

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Image by Zoetnet

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Image by Hans Pohl

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Image by Michael Livsey

https://www.flickr.com/photos/110500004@N07/44245729750/in/photolist-2apQVXu-W1639o-pxBADu-29TxJgD-fuc8dc-scET9m-RJixWw-8F1Ttm-kostq-bgxfo2-BvLNJP-kvLPm-kvMcA-GdrLTZ-53kham-qPENTF-7DtHQb-5DXqsc-e3eArm-3FgPJ-kvMoS-h2KRQ-Zgmx-Cey9vQ-NARgfC-bVV2WM-fcFwq-rD9Qhs-H9YF2T-6nAt2H-qSfYDP-rvMikE-K4GDNF-9bpu2Q-ehfwZQ-ozNLea-iNseA-6uKvE-24CMjyV-dsmW9a-dLnxeZ-vJpNs-8ce6MT-dSzsbN-GG4FP-9BepPF-23rc6Jy-dA3XQ4-4d9QG-pNVGyt

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Original images used in my VFX composite

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Original images used in my VFX composite

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Femme fatale

Misogynistic men

Same characters often star in a number of films of the same genre

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Flashbacks

Narration

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Taboo subjects

Murder

Revenge

Someone evil going against what is expected

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Specific locations and settings

Cigarettes

Guns

Hostile city

Trench coats

Low key lighting

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Film genre conventions can be categorised by the following:

Iconography

Theme

Modes of narrative

Characters

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Is a style of lighting used in mostly black and white films due to the contrast between the areas of light and dark. This creates drama and tension as well as demonstrating an artistic style to the film. Welles uses this style of lighting, as do many directors of the Film Noir genre.

It is also common for films in the Noir genre to have lighting highlighting the scene by using the blinds as a style choice. By using the shadows of the blinds to represent tension, yet also using chiaroscuro lighting for a professional technique.

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By Orson Welles.

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By Orson Welles.

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Welles was most well known for being an actor and director, as well as creating iconic films such as Touch of Evil (1958) and Citizen Kane (1941), which he also starred in.

Welles created a number of well known Film Noir films including Touch of Evil (1958) and The Lady From Shanghai (1947).

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By Billy Wilder.

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By Billy Wilder.

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Was well known for creating iconic films such as Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Seven Year Itch (1955) which both feature  Marilyn Monroe.

Wilder also has a number of Film Noir films such as Double Idemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).

It was common for actors to be used in a number of films by the same director and writers, as this made the audience familiarise themselves with the genre of the film, and the actors involved.

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Features films such as The Big Sleep (1946) by Howard Hawks and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) by Robert Aldrich.

Article by Samuel Wigley

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It's "the weirdest great movie ever made", in critic Dave Kehr's words. The one in which Orson Welles plays a sailor with an overcooked Irish accent, and that ends with a shootout in a hall of mirrors.

Now available in a digital restoration, The Lady from Shanghai was made when Welles was Hollywood's fallen golden boy. It looked like he'd never again be trusted with the creative freedoms he was granted for Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); instead, he briefly turned his hand to a new kind of shadowy thriller that would become known as film noir.

First up was The Stranger (1946), and then this delirious oddity in which seaman Michael O'Hara (Welles) becomes a pawn in a convoluted murder plot after meeting the beautiful Elsa ( Rita Hayworth) in New York and taking work on her wealthy husband's yacht on a cruise to San Francisco via the Panama Canal.

It's part sailor's shaggy dog story, part a recriminatory enquiry into the alluring Hayworth. Elsa is one of film noir's great fatal women, but she was then also Welles' estranged wife, so the perversity coursing through this particular tale of duplicity and desire runs ocean deep.

The style of film noir would cross the water to Britain and France and elsewhere in the world, just as it would return in the 1970s and 80s and the present day. But, at the very start, film noir meant a particular cycle of cynical American thrillers beginning around 1941 and continuing until about 1959. For two decades, acerbic dialogue, grids of shadow, twisty plots and twisted characters reigned supreme - the results remain a cinematic gold mine, but the following are 10 of the very best.

Double Indemnity (1944)

What is film noir? Watch Double Indemnity and you'll know straight away. Billy Wilder 's classic was part of a wave of films in 1944 (see also: Laura; Murder, My Sweet; The Woman in the Window) that crystallised the emerging genre once and for all. It was these that admiring French critics saw after the end of the Second World War and first called 'film noir'.

Most of this shady cycle featured treacherous women ('femme fatales') duping guileless men, and few of these were more alluring than Phyllis Dietrichson ( Barbara Stanwyck), who ensnares policy salesman Walter Neff ( Fred MacMurray) in her scheme to do away with her husband and claim the insurance payout. The sign in the still above says "STOP", but - from his first glimpse of Dietrichson's bare ankles at the top of the stairs in her hacienda-style villa - we know that Neff doesn't know how to.

Told in flashback, as Neff tapes his confession for the benefit of his wily colleague Barton Keyes ( Edward G. Robinson), this is one of film history's slinkiest, most seductive pleasures. The novels of James M. Cain provided the basis for two more essential noirs: Mildred Pierce (1945) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

Laura (1944)

Director Otto Preminger

The US release of Laura followed a month on from Double Indemnity, in the autumn of 1944 - gathering momentum, this delicious new taste in film thriller was here to stay. Where the Wilder film revels in sunlit SoCal treachery, Laura is all urbane east coast, and the tongues are, if anything, even sharper - particularly where the waspish columnist Waldo Lydecker ( Clifton Webb) is concerned. Into Lydecker's perfumed, drawing-room world comes police detective Mark McPherson ( Dana Andrews) to investigate the brutal murder of the beautiful young Laura, whose portrait in oil still hangs alluringly over the fireplace.

The twisting, turning plot was adapted from a serialised novel by Vera Caspary, and while Laura works brilliantly as a mystery thriller, it's the characters that stick in the mind: not just Laura and Lydecker, but Vincent Price's Shelby Carpenter, a leaching playboy, and McPherson himself, a forerunner to James Stewart's character in Vertigo (1958) in his yearning exaltation of a dead woman. Preminger was one of the best noir directors, so there are more like this: Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), Angel Face (1952).

The Big Sleep (1946)

Director Howard Hawks

Perhaps it might be considered lazy casting that Howard Hawks got Humphrey Bogart in to play private eye Philip Marlowe in this adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel. After all, Bogart had played that other great hard-boiled gumshoe, Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon (1941), one of film noir's very first shots across the bow.

But The Big Sleep's innovations came elsewhere. Hawks takes the by now established visual and thematic scenery of noir and uses it to create... a screwball romance. Sure, there are shadows, vice and guns enough in this story of blackmail, pornography and spoiled daughters - "my, my, my" says Marlowe after another revolver is pulled on him, "so many guns around town, and so few brains". Yet noir's world-weary cynicism is only a game here, as meaningless as the plot that no one can follow - it's all just movie backdrop to the whipcrack foreplay talk of Bogart and Lauren Bacall, real-life husband and wife to whom Hawks gives a movie to ping-pong innuendo at each other like a gloriously inclusive means of delaying gratification.

The director never made another film noir, probably because he wasn't able to play the game: noir's wallows in the gutter should be sceptical and disenchanted, but Hawks brings the ecstasy.

Gilda (1946)

Director Charles Vidor

It's almost unforgivable that there's nothing from either Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak on this list: each of them made half a dozen of the very finest film noirs. Instead, this film from Charles Vidor. Vidor, too, was an émigré from Europe, but one whose career seems a good deal patchier in retrospect, with Gilda perhaps his one true claim on immortality.

It's set in Buenos Aires, at a casino run by the warped tycoon Ballin Mundson ( George Macready). Into this exotic setting comes drifter Johnny Farrell ( Glenn Ford); he's new in town and accepts an offer from Ballin to become his protégé. But it turns out Ballin's ravishing wife Gilda (Rita Hayworth) used to be Johnny's lover and the stage is set for a maelstrom of erotic tensions and perverse powerplay. Hayworth had worked with Vidor on the musical Cover Girl (1944), but gets her best moment here as the exuberant femme fatale who generates so much sexual heat, flinging her hair back with abandon or seductively peeling off her long black gloves as she sings 'Put the Blame on Mame' in the film's famous striptease sequence.

Gilda is a film to show to anyone who needs introducing to the joys of the old Hollywood studio system, when lustrous black-and-white photography and set design bordering on abstraction created pressure-cooker worlds of tortuous feeling.

Out of the Past (1947)

Director Jacques Tourneur

Out of the past comes a man in a dark suit. We're in small-town California, and if garageman Jeff Bailey ( Robert Mitchum) thinks he can just settle down to a life of sweetness and light and leave the shadows behind him he's got another thing coming. This stranger in town is here to remind him, and before long we're headfirst into a flashback about a nefarious gambler ( Kirk Douglas) and a duplicitous dame ( Jane Greer). We scramble to keep track as we flit from Lake Tahoe to Acapulco, the twists turning and the darkness doubling.

Jacques Tourneur 's beguiling 1947 film, known as Build My Gallows High in the UK, is film noir served neat. All the hallmarks are here: the laconic anti-hero, the femme fatale, the trenchcoats, the theme of fate coming back to hit you like a boomerang, the tricksy non-chronological structure, the plumes of cigarette smoke wreathing through the gloom. As with The Big Sleep, it doesn't matter if you can't quite follow it all: the walk in the half light is sublime.

The Reckless Moment (1949)

The Reckless Moment begins with a well-dressed woman in horn-rimmed sunglasses, Lucia Harper ( Joan Bennett), driving into Los Angeles. We know immediately that there's something furtive about her mission; people just don't wear sunglasses in 1940s cinema unless something shady is afoot. Sure enough, she has come to tell some local sleaze to stop seeing her daughter Bea; later, she'll be left desperately trying to cover up his accidental death in order to keep Bea out of suspicion.

Based on a novel by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Max Ophuls ' film is actually a good deal less cynical and hard-boiled than most core film noir. Like Mildred Pierce and other films that are perched midway between noir and women's melodrama, it doubles as a piercing account of a strong-willed woman fighting for her family, while also feeling the suffocation of domestic life.

Though he had not been in America long, the German director sketches a vivid portrait of life in a coastal Californian small town, in a way that makes it seem both idyllic and like a cushioned prison: Lucia's every moment is plagued either by the habitualised pestering of her family or by the benign prying of her neighbours. Ophuls uses the shadows of noir like a cloak, but the depth of his feeling for the characters - not least James Mason 's lovestruck blackmailer - shows through the disguise.

In a Lonely Place (1950)

Director Nicholas Ray

Film noir isn't always as truly dark as it's cracked up to be, but Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place is one film where the desolation cuts to the bone. It's set in Hollywood, which might have something to do with it, and stars Humphrey Bogart as Dix Steele, an embittered and washed-up screenwriter with a fiery temper. One night, he pays a hat-check girl to help out with a script read-through and when she's found dead the next morning, Steele comes under suspicion. An actor neighbour, Laurel ( Gloria Grahame), gives him an alibi, and later the pair begins to fall in love... but Dix's tendency to lash out increasingly makes Laurel wonder.

The story of a woman slowly coming to suspect that her partner is a murderer harkens back to 40s melodramas such as Suspicion (1941) and Gaslight (1944), but the way the relationship is depicted here is much more nuanced and adult - more frightening in its barely contained violence. An aching sense of sadness attends the blackening mood as the happiness of a love affair runs against the rocks.

A couple of other Nick Ray films get called noir too, but - like In a Lonely Place - each is a good deal richer and stranger than most: They Live by Night (1948), On Dangerous Ground (1951).

Pickup on South Street (1953)

Director Samuel Fuller

We begin in the sticky heat of a New York subway train. Candy ( Jean Peters), her bored face covered with a film of perspiration, is being eyed up by two men - we later find out they're surveillance men, so their voyeurism is strictly professional. Then Skip McCoy ( Richard Widmark) shuffles toward her in the carriage, and his invasion is bolder still - maintaining an insolent stare as he fishes her purse from her handbag.

Sam Fuller's in-your-face thriller finds the pickpocket becoming the unwitting spare part in an anti-communist sting; unbeknown to Candy, her purse contains microfilm that American intelligence hopes will lead them to a network of communists. It's a test case in what can be done inside of 80 minutes if you've got enough intelligence, filmmaking verve and pulp energy to keep everything in check. Widmark is unforgettable as the snarling, self-interested hoodlum caught up in political manoeuvring that he neither knows nor cares about, while Moe Williams ( Thelma Ritter) is one of film noir's most tragic supporting characters, the professional stool pigeon who knows all the angles but is undone by a fatal sense of loyalty.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Director Robert Aldrich

The dead of night. A distressed woman, out of breath, running along a desert road. The broken lines in the middle of the asphalt flash by luminously like a premonition of Lynch. A speeding roadster is forced to a halt. "You almost wrecked my car," the driver snarls, before letting her in. Nat King Cole comes in on the radio as the breathless woman settles into the passenger seat, and we're off, into the night, as the opening credits roll perversely from top to bottom.

If the hairs aren't prickling on the back of your neck after this minute of screen time, then film noir's not for you. The man is Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), the most unpleasant gumshoe in the whole canon; the woman is Christina ( Cloris Leachman), though she doesn't last long. Why is she running at night, wearing nothing but a trenchcoat? It's something to do with "the great whatsit" - a mysterious, glowing must-have that results in a trail of corpses. Like Pickup on South Street, Kiss Me Deadly is film noir in its Cold War phase, when the evil looms as big as a mushroom cloud and petulant protagonists are liable to get more than their fingers burned.

Touch of Evil (1958)

Director Orson Welles

Orson Welles's Touch of Evil is usually considered one of the very last film noirs of the original period, and probably its last masterpiece. The genre would see a resurgence in the 1970s with films such as The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974), but by then it was starting to look and feel a little different - they were in colour for a start.

Welles hadn't made a film in Hollywood for a decade (almost since The Lady from Shanghai) when B-movie producer Albert Zugsmith hired him for this sleazy tale set in a California-Mexico border town very like Tijuana. Everybody talks about the three-minute extended shot which opens the film, in which a bomb is placed in a car that then explodes after crossing the US border, but with good reason: has a movie ever thrown us into the thick atmosphere of a place with such flair and tension?

We're in for a tale of marijuana, murder and police corruption and we're already hooked. Charlton Heston is the Mexican border cop, Janet Leigh his imperilled wife, and Welles himself the gargantuan, cigar-chewing US detective Hank Quinlan who provides the genre with one of its best villains. This is pulp art writ large; noir at its baroque, sweaty, intoxicating best.

Your suggestions

1. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)

2. The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

3. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)

4. Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944)

5. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)

6. Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)

7. White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

8. Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

9. The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)

10. Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949)

A huge range of terrific suggestions came in on Facebook and Twitter when we asked you what you thought we'd missed from this list, proving just how rich and plentiful is the canon of classic American film noir. We've counted up the numbers and are particularly pleased to see two films each from directors Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak make it into the top 10 - we'd felt guilty about omitting those noir masters. Siodmak's The Killers, especially, had a chorus of supporting voices. Nudging it out of the top spot, however, is that weird and wonderful tale of a down-on-his-luck screenwriter being taken under the wing of a washed-up silent-screen actress: Billy Wilder's gothic-noir classic Sunset Blvd.

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It's "the weirdest great movie ever made", in critic Dave Kehr's words. The one in which Orson Welles plays a sailor with an overcooked Irish accent, and that ends with a shootout in a hall of mirrors. Now available in a digital restoration, The Lady from Shanghai was made when Welles was Hollywood's fallen golden boy.

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I took inspiration from Frank Miller's, Robert Rodriguez' and Quentin Tarantino's 2005 film Sin City. The film is a modern take on Film Noir focusing on thriller and crime as genres.
I liked how colourisation has been used to pick out key elements in a scene such as clothing, eye colour or blood. I have been inspired to use this element in my own work and only pick out key details which could be coloured, keeping the majority of the scene in black and white.

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The following films are featured on Netflix under the category Film Noir.

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Features films such as Double Idemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder and Touch of Evil (1958) by Orson Welles.

Article by The Guardian

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Nicholas Ray's astonishingly self-assured, lyrical directorial debut opens with title cards and lush orchestrations over shots of a boy and a girl in rapturous mutual absorption: "This boy ... and this gir ... were never properly introduced ... to the world we live in ..." A shriek of horns suddenly obliterates all other sound - their shocked faces both turn toward the camera, and the title appears: They Live by Night.

10. They Live by Night

Nicholas Ray's astonishingly self-assured, lyrical directorial debut opens with title cards and lush orchestrations over shots of a boy and a girl in rapturous mutual absorption: "This boy ... and this gir ... were never properly introduced ... to the world we live in ..." A shriek of horns suddenly obliterates all other sound - their shocked faces both turn toward the camera, and the title appears: They Live by Night.

Meet 23-year-old escaped killer Bowie Bowers and his farm-girl sweetheart Keechie Mobley (Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell), in an imaginary idyll of peace and contentment that will never come true for them. Bowie, jailed at 16 for killing his father's murderer, has known nothing but jail, and is still a boy. Having escaped the prison farm with two older bank robbers - T-Dub and the psychotic Indian Chicamaw "One-Eye" Mobley (Jay C Flippen, Howard da Silva) - he feels loyalty-bound to tag along on their crime spree. Keechie is Chicamaw's niece, and soon circumstances force them to lam it cross-country at the same time as they tremblingly discover love for the first time.

Somehow all the planets aligned for Ray, a novice director with an achingly poetic-realist vision of Depression-era Texas and the determination to implement it wholesale: a perfect source novel, Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us; and exactly the right combination of producer (John Houseman), studio (RKO) and sympathetic studio head (Dore Schary). The result is luminous in its imagery, highly sophisticated in its musical choices (the folk song I Know Where I'm Going succinctly and repeatedly stresses that they don't know anything at all) suffused with romantic fatalism - they'll die by night, too; you know it from the start - and enriched by Ray's total identification with his characters' doomed trajectory. Ray's first masterpiece, and a pinnacle of poetic noir. John Patterson

9. Kiss Me Deadly

Kiss Me Deadly is the black-hearted apotheosis of film noir, and a key film of the 50s, embodying the profoundest anxieties of Eisenhower's America: it ends with the detonation of a nuclear device on Malibu beach and, presumably thereafter, the end of the world itself. Robert Aldrich's moral universe is so violently out of kilter that even his opening credits run upside down. His hero, Mike Hammer, is an amoral, proto-fascist bedroom detective and 1,000% scumbag, but the villains he encounters are far, far worse.

Kiss Me Deadly opens with a woman, naked under a raincoat, fleeing headlong and barefoot down a highway at night. Rescued by Hammer, then un-rescued by her faceless original captors, she dies screaming under gruesome torture with pliers (Aldrich was always at the vanguard in his use of violence). Thereafter, Hammer finds himself on a terrifying hunt through the criminal underworld of Los Angeles, from his gleamingly modern office in posh Brentwood to the dilapidated flophouses of Bunker Hill, as he bludgeons, browbeats, blackmails and brutalises his way inch by inch towards a resolution that will destroy everyone and everything, all in search of the elusive "Great Whatsit" - a deadly, molten, much sought-after package that's grandfather to the suitcase in Pulp Fiction and the Chevy Nova in Repo Man.

Aldrich, a patrician aristocrat and a committed leftist, despised Mickey Spillane's nihilistic worldview and Mike Hammer's Cro-Magnon brutishness, and gave them the adaptation they deserved. Ralph Meeker, who usually played scumbag saddle-tramps and mobsters, bagged the sneering lead role and remains indelibly detestable even today: "Open a window," says one disgusted cop, as Hammer leaves the room. Surrounded by gargoyles and grotesques, even on his own team - he uses his secretary Velma as willing sexual bait - Hammer is a cynic who knows everything about human weakness but nothing about the frame he's in. And it all ends with a bang - the big bang. JP

8. Blood Simple

Taking its atmospheric title from a line in Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled novel Red Harvest (an allusion never explained), Blood Simple is perhaps the Coen brothers' most straightforward movie, even though it is, ironically, not at all simple. In a manner that would come to be their stock-in-trade, the film is a cacophony of cross-purposes, in some ways a rehearsal for their breakout effort Fargo, which also depicts a nefarious plan gone wrong. It also marks the use of literary genre elements in the "real" world, a formula that would later be refined by Quentin Tarantino.

As in so much film noir, the crux of the story is a case of cherchez la femme. In this case la femme is Abby Marty (Frances McDormand), wife of Texas bar owner Julian (Dan Hedaya). Julian suspects Abby of having an affair with one of his staff, and when private eye Loren Visser (M Emmet Walsh) confirms this to be the case, Julian sets a murder plan in motion. For most directors this would be enough, but the Coens embrace the full-on complications of the genre to create a genuine sense of an "easy" crime spiralling out of control.

One of the first films to cement the nascent Sundance film festival's reputation, Blood Simple isn't so much neo-noir as neo-neo-noir, using postmodern flourishes that still seem bold today. The most vivid is Walsh as Visser, presented more like a cold-blooded Universal Studios monster than a gumshoe, and the non-naturalistic lighting is often at odds with noir tradition, with the brothers allowing brilliant shafts of bright light to puncture the neon-lit dark. Best of all is the use of the Four Tops' It's the Same Old Song as a motif - a neat touch that expresses genre familiarity with affection rather than cynicism. Damon Wise

7. Lift to the Scaffold

Louis Malle's first fiction feature, based on Noel Calef's 1956 novel, occupies a very interesting space. It qualifies as film noir for its appropriation of US postwar cinema in its tale of lovers gone bad, but also heralds the imminent arrival of the French new wave. The director was in his mid-20s at the time and clearly using the crime-thriller genre (something he never returned to) as a testing ground and not a strict template. Perhaps that explains why his film is such a melting pot of influences, drawing not only on Hitchcock but also the Master of Suspense's overseas admirers, including Henri-Georges Clouzot and his Les Diaboliques.

As in that film, the story concerns a conspiracy to murder. Ex-Foreign Legion soldier Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), a veteran of French military misadventures in Algeria and Indochina, is planning to kill his boss, who is also his lover's husband. On paper, the plan is seamless - Tavernier secures his alibis and enters his victim's office unseen, by means of a rope - but things soon get messy. On returning to the crime scene to retrieve a key piece of evidence, Tavernier finds himself trapped in the elevator, leaving his car parked outside with the keys in the ignition.

Although its elements point towards nailbiting tension, this isn't so much what Lift to the Scaffold is about; it draws more on the blanket fatalism of film noir rather than the savage irony so often associated with the genre. Key to this is Jeanne Moreau as Tavernier's lover, Florence; in the film's signature sequence her man fails to turn up, so she walks the streets trying vainly to find him. Filmed on the fly without professional lighting, accompanied only by Miles Davis's brilliant, melancholy score, these few minutes capture the bleak and beautiful essence of Malle's film. DW

6. The Third Man

"One of the amazing things about The Third Man," Steven Soderbergh once wrote, "is that it really is a great film, in spite of all the people who say it's a great film." He's right. It's one of the greatest, in fact: a witty, elegantly shot and steadfastly compassionate thriller suffused with the dreadful melancholia of the finest noir. It's set in Allied-occupied Vienna, where writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) pitches up at the invitation of his old chum Harry Lime. Except that when Martins arrives, Lime turns out to be dead. At least that's the prevailing wisdom at his funeral.

To say anything else about the mystery that Martins unravels would be to jeopardise some of the zesty surprises of this 64-year-old masterpiece. (Is there a statute of limitations on spoilers?) But then The Third Man is about more than plot. The morally fermented atmosphere of Vienna mapped out by Graham Greene's screenplay (based on his own story) is sustained beautifully by Robert Krasker's cinematography, with top notes of mischief introduced by Anton Karas's sprightly zither playing. An unassuming actor named Orson Welles also puts in an appearance, skulking in a doorway in one of the wittiest of all movie entrances, then delivering a speech full of humble horrors from the vantage point of a ferris wheel overlooking the city.

The key to the picture's genius is undoubtedly the mutually nourishing collaboration between Greene and the director Carol Reed. Seen in tandem with their other films together ( The Fallen Idol, Our Man in Havana) there is a strong case to be made for them as one of the finest writer/director teams in cinema. Reed is not only alert to every nuance in Greene's writing but adept at finding pointed visual equivalents for his prose. Back to Soderbergh: "Disillusion, betrayal, misdirected sexual longing and the wilful inability of Americans to understand or appreciate other cultures - these are a few of my favourite things, and The Third Man blends them all seamlessly with an airtight plot and a location that blurs the line between beauty and decay." Ryan Gilbey

5. Out of the Past

No one ever smoked and brooded and loomed like Robert Mitchum. And he never did it as definitively as he does in Out of the Past, a stylish and devastating noir that was one of a hat-trick of perfect genre pieces directed by Jacques Tourneur in the 1940s (along with Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie). Viewers not enamoured of the actor's somnambulant manner might take the latter title for a description of what it must be like to act alongside Mitchum. But that would be to miss the bitter, internalised hurt and wounded hope he brings to his performance here; just because he's still, that doesn't mean he's not suffering.

Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, a private eye hired by Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to track down his errant lover, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who skedaddled after swiping $40,000 of his money. Oh, and shooting him. It may not be any surprise that when Jeff catches up with the fugitive femme fatale, there is a crackle of attraction between them. The seductive skill of the movie lies in its masterful evocation of that sensual, fatalistic bleakness crucial to noir. From Nicholas Musuraca's chiaroscuro cinematography ("It was so dark on set, you didn't know who else was there half the time," said Greer) to Roy Webb's plangent score and the guarded, electrifying performances, it's nothing short of a noir masterclass.

The screenplay was adapted by Daniel Mainwaring from his own novel, Build My Gallows High (the film's UK title). But the sharpened splinters of dialogue also bear the mark of Cain - James M Cain, that is, the legendary author of noir landmarks The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, who performed vital but uncredited rewrites. According to Mitchum's biographer, Lee Server, it was Cain who expunged Kathie of any traces of lovability. "She can't be all bad - no one is," one character remarks of her. To which Jeff shoots back: "She comes the closest." RG

4. Double Indemnity

Cameron Crowe called Double Indemnity "flawless film-making". Woody Allen declared it "the greatest movie ever made". Even if you can't go along with that, there can be no disputing that it is the finest film noir of all time, though it was made in 1944, before the term film noir was even coined. Adapting James M Cain's 1935 novella about a straight-arrow insurance salesman tempted into murder by a duplicitous housewife, genre-hopping director Billy Wilder recruited Raymond Chandler as co-writer. Chandler, said Wilder, "was a mess, but he could write a beautiful sentence". Noir's visual style, which had its roots in German expressionism, was forged here, though Wilder insisted that he was going for a "newsreel" effect. "We had to be realistic," he said. "You had to believe the situation and the characters, or all was lost."

And we do. Fred MacMurray, who had specialised largely in comedy until that point, was an inspired choice to play the big dope Walter Neff, who narrates the sorry mess in flashback, and wonders: "How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?" Edward G Robinson is coiled and charismatic as Neff's colleague, a claims adjuster who unpicks the couple's scheme. But the ace in the hole is Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, a vision of amorality in a "honey of an anklet" and a platinum wig. She can lower her sunglasses and make it look like the last word in predatory desire. And she's not just a vamp: she's a psychopath. There are few shots in cinema as bone-chilling as the closeup on Stanwyck's face as Neff dispatches Phyllis's husband in the back seat of a car. Miklós Rózsa's fretful strings tell us throughout the picture: beware. Stanwyck had been reluctant to take the role, confessing: "I was a little frightened of it." Wilder asked whether she was an actress or a mouse. When she plumped for the former, he shot back: "Then take the part." RG

3. Touch of Evil

In the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson - the source material for this movie - the hero is an American man who has been married to a Mexican woman for nine years. It was Orson Welles who flipped the racial mix, and made the marriage brand new. Welles intended a story of three frontiers: the rancid Mexican-American border; the way a good detective becomes a bad cop; and a provocation on interracial sexuality. To be sure, it's a recognisable Charlton Heston in makeup as Mike Vargas, with Janet Leigh as Susie - but in 1958, that bond disturbed a lot of viewers. Moreover, the overtone of honeymoon is a wicked setup for threats of rape. Will the horrendous border scum get to Susie before Mike? If you doubt that suggestiveness, just notice how the car bomb explodes as the honeymooners are ready to enjoy their first kiss on US soil. This is a crime picture in which coitus interruptus has to be listed with all the other charges.

Metaphorically and cinematically, it's a picture about crossing over - in one sumptuous camera setup we track the characters over the border. That shot is famous, but it's no richer than the single setup in a cramped motel suite that proves how Hank Quinlan (Welles himself) plants dynamite on the man he intends to frame. These scenes were a way for Welles to say, "I'm as good as ever", but they are also crucial to the uneasiness that runs through the picture and the gloating panorama of an unwholesome society. The aura of crime has seeped into every cell of ordinary behaviour: the city officials are corrupt, the night man (Dennis Weaver) needs a rest home, and the gang that come to the motel to get Susie are one of the first warnings of drugs in American movies. Not least, of course, Quinlan - a sheriff gone to hell on candy bars.

So evil is not just a "touch". It is criminality in the blood. Marlene Dietrich's Tanya watches over this doom like a witch or prophet, a bleak reminder that there is no hope. Fifty years later, that border is still an open wound. David Thomson

2. Chinatown

The near perfection of Roman Polanski's Chinatown starts with Diener/Hauser/Bates's haunting art nouveau poster for the film: an emblematic Hokusai wave breaks against Jack Nicholson's silhouette as the smoke from his cigarette floats up to merge with Faye Dunaway's medusa-like hair. The movie ends equally unforgettably with the line, "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown!", as lapidary a pay-off as Scarlett O'Hara's, "After all, tomorrow is another day."

Behind the angst-ridden noirs of the 40s and 50s lie the social and political tensions of the second world war and the postwar decade. Similarly, Chinatown was conceived, written, produced and released in the troubled period that included the last years of the Vietnam war, Watergate, and Nixon's fraught second term in the White House. But it retained its freshness, vitality and timelessness by being set so immaculately in an earlier period - Los Angeles in the long, hot summer of 1937 - and it deals with the scandals of that era, those touching on the complex politics of water in the arid west.

While gathering divorce evidence on behalf of a suspicious wife, Gittes (Nicholson) is sucked into a world beyond his comprehension involving municipal corruption, sexual transgression and the power of old money. He encounters the rich, ruthless capitalist Noah Cross (John Huston) and his estranged daughter, the beautiful Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), whose husband, head of the Los Angeles Water and Power Board, dies under mysterious circumstances.

In his screenplay, Robert Towne develops two dominant metaphors; the first centres on water. During a period of drought someone is dumping water from local reservoirs, and it becomes clear that this most precious of human resources is being manipulated by land speculators in their own interests. The name of Evelyn's husband, Hollis Mulwray, evokes William Mullholland, the Los Angeles engineer responsible in the 20s for the deals that, in the old western phrase, "made water flow uphill in search of the money". The name Noah Cross suggests the protective Old Testament patriarch played in the 1966 blockbuster The Bible by John Huston, but here reprised in a less benevolent mode as a self-righteous plutocrat who has harnessed the flood in his own interests.

The other metaphor is that of Chinatown, an inscrutable place that outsiders either stand back from or misread in a way that demonstrates the futility of good intentions. Jake worked in Chinatown during his days in the LAPD and, at the end of the picture, returns there in a bid for redemption that turns out to be an act of tragic pointlessness. He's in every scene, frequently with the camera just behind him. We see and experience everything from his point of view, with Polanski composing every frame, dictating each camera movement.

The movie captures the city in a summer heatwave: the blinding exteriors dazzle the eye and blur the judgment; shafts of light create a sinister atmosphere as they penetrate the dark interiors through venetian blinds. Jerry Goldsmith's superb score uses strings and percussion during moments of suspense and a distant, and bluesy trumpet for elegiac, contemplative scenes. Above all there is Nicholson's Gittes, a cocky, confident operator losing his social moorings and ending up as the proverbial drowning man reaching out for straws. Philip French

1. The Big Sleep

The "big sleep" of the title is of course death, but the action in Howard Hawks's classic hardboiled thriller from 1946, taken from the Raymond Chandler novel, often looks like the sleep of reason bringing forth monsters. Only the fiercest concentration will keep you on top of the head-spinning plot, and in fact the plot reportedly defeated its stars and director while they were actually shooting, cutting, reshooting and arguing about it. An explanatory scene was removed and replaced with one showing the leads flirting in a restaurant. Plot transparency was sacrificed in favour of the film's sexual mood music and making its female star, Lauren Bacall, every bit as compelling as she could be. The fact that Hawks moreover had to be relatively coy about the pornography and drugs makes the proceedings look even more occult and mysterious.

But the narrative's defiance of our comprehension is part of the film's sensational effect and its remarkable longevity: it means that scenes, characters, moments and quotable lines ("She tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up") float up out of the mesmerising stew and into your consciousness like fragments of a dream. The noir fused pulp detective fiction with the enigmatic form of German expressionism and The Big Sleep is an almost surrealist refinement of the noir genre.

Bogart is Philip Marlowe, a private detective called in by an ageing sensualist when his pretty, tearaway daughter is being blackmailed. Yet Marlowe is enamoured of her sister: a very cool customer played, of course, by Lauren Bacall. She was 20 years old and Bogart, her husband, was 44 but looking older - unwell, and battling with a drinking problem. Nowadays, discussing the presence or absence of "chemistry" between stars has become a critical commonplace. Bogart and Bacall virtually invented the subject with their droll, laconic dialogue. There is a palpable charge in the air. Bacall ventilates the male atmosphere of the film, which is otherwise heavy, gloomy and dark: Bogart himself appears in almost every scene of the film and the mystery is also when he has time to go back home and sleep.

The movie's disturbing and incomprehensibly labyrinthine story of murder and betrayal now looks like a fable by David Lynch, but Hawks his own storytelling force and potent and distinctive presence. Decades later, Polanski's gumshoe would retreat from the unknowable mess of Chinatown, but the disturbing and chaotic crime-swirl of greed, vanity, lust and murder - its vortex too low down to be clearly seen - was trademarked by Hawks, Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep. Peter Bradshaw

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Nicholas Ray's astonishingly self-assured, lyrical directorial debut opens with title cards and lush orchestrations over shots of a boy and a girl in rapturous mutual absorption: "This boy ... and this gir ... were never properly introduced ... to the world we live in ..."