What is the best film noir of the 1940s?

Cigarette smoke, femmes fatales, and shadows with something to hide — the 1940s noir canon set the template for every dark thriller that followed. Which one is the purest masterpiece?

1

Double Indemnity

Billy Wilder's 1944 definitive film noir about an insurance salesman seduced into a murder plot by a calculating femme fatale.

2

Laura

Otto Preminger's 1944 stylish whodunit in which a detective investigating a woman's murder becomes obsessed with her portrait.

3

The Maltese Falcon

John Huston's 1941 classic adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel featuring Humphrey Bogart as cynical private eye Sam Spade.

4

The Big Sleep

Howard Hawks's 1946 labyrinthine Raymond Chandler adaptation with Bogart as Philip Marlowe navigating a bewilderingly corrupt Los Angeles.

5

Out of the Past

Jacques Tourneur's 1947 quintessential noir about a former private eye whose past catches up with him after he falls for a gangster's girlfriend.

6

Gilda

Charles Vidor's 1946 provocative noir starring Rita Hayworth in her most iconic role as a captivating and destructive femme fatale in Buenos Aires.

7

Mildred Pierce

Michael Curtiz's 1945 Joan Crawford Oscar vehicle — a melodramatic noir about a self-made woman whose devotion to her daughter proves her undoing.

8

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Tay Garnett's 1946 steamy noir about a drifter who plots with a restless married woman to kill her husband.

9

Murder, My Sweet

Edward Dmytryk's 1944 pulpy Chandler adaptation featuring Dick Powell reinventing himself as a hard-boiled Philip Marlowe.

10

The Blue Dahlia

George Marshall's 1946 Raymond Chandler original screenplay following a war veteran who returns home to find his wife murdered.

11

Dark Passage

Delmer Daves's 1947 inventive Bogart-Bacall noir with a daring first-person camera perspective as a wrongly convicted man escapes prison.

12

Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 romantic spy thriller about an FBI agent who recruits a woman to infiltrate a Nazi organization by seducing its leader.