# 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?

*By YPB Team · Published June 1, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-film-noir-of-the-1940s*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

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.

Tags: movies, historical, classics, crime