1940's The Arts

1940's The Arts

The 1940's

Movies after the War


Film Noir Develops.

In 1941 Warner Bros, released The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and based on the 1930 novel of the

Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, and Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, 1941. © Corbis-Bettmann.
same name by Dashiell Hammett. The movie was an unexpected hit. No one then knew that the film would become a Hollywood classic the first of a host of dark detective movies. In 1946 critic Nino Frank, noticing this trend, coined the phrase film noir, or black film. He saw a similarity between this loose group of films and the hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Pulp fiction had made it to the screen. Detective novelists such as Hammett, Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep;...

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