3 Classic Film Noirs

1) The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 Warner Bros. film written and directed by John Huston. In 1941 San Francisco, private investigators Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) meet a beautiful prospective client, Miss Ruth Wonderly (Mary Astor). Wonderly claims to be looking for her missing sister, who is involved with a man named Floyd Thursby. Wonderly is to meet Thursby and hopes her sister will be with him. After receiving a substantial retainer, Archer volunteers to follow her that night and help her get her sister back. Archer is killed, and a huge plot ensues where, a jeweled falcon is the reason for all the killing.
With its low-key lighting and inventive and arresting angles, the work of Director of Photography Arthur Edeson is one of the film’s great assets. Unusual camera angles—sometimes low to the ground, revealing the ceilings of rooms

2) D.O.A
D.O.A. (1950), a film noir drama film directed by Rudolph Maté, is considered a classic of the genre. The frantically-paced plot revolves around a doomed man's quest to find out who has poisoned him – and why – before he dies

The film begins, the scene is a long, behind-the-back tracking sequence featuring Frank Bigelow (O'Brien) walking through a hallway into a police station to report a murder: his own. Disconcertingly, the police almost seem to have been expecting him and already know who he is. The film is mainly a huge flashback, where the main character recalls everything, from when he was poisoned; all the way to the point he kills the murderer. Once the deed was done, he dies and the detective who was listening to his story says to put on his case D.O.A- Dead on Arrival.



Touch Of Evil
Touch of Evil (1958) is a black-and-white American film, written, directed and co-starring Orson Welles. Paul Monash and Franklin Coen also wrote scenes for the film. The screenplay was loosely based on the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson (a pseudonym for Robert Wade and William Miller). The cast also included Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, and Marlene Dietrich. This movie is considered one of the last examples of film noir in the genre's classic era (from the early 1940s until the late 1950s).
The movie opens with a famous three-minute, thirty second continuous tracking shot that film critics (such as Bob Dorien and Robert Osborne) generally consider to be one of the greatest long shots in cinematic history. Beginning on the Mexico/US border, this shot shows a man placing a bomb in a car and then the journey of the car past the border crossing into the United States. The scene ends with Mike (Charlton Heston) and Susie Vargas (Janet Leigh), newlyweds, kissing. The scene then cuts to the car, containing a man and a woman, exploding.