The phrase film noir was first coined in 1946 by a group of French critics to describe the emerging movement of mainly black and white Hollywood films with dark, pessimistic themes and signature motifs such as alienated antiheroes, rain slicked streets, dark shadows and seductive femme fatales.
Borrowing heavily from the hard-boiled but literary detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, film noir attracted some of cinema’s greatest craftsmen including Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder and John Huston, as well as directors who came to specialise in the genre such as Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger.
