(French; " black film ")
Film genre that offers dark or fatalistic interpretations of reality.
The term is applied to U.S. films of the late 1940s and early '50s that portrayed a seamy or criminal underworld and cynical characters, often shot at night or in shadowy interiors. The genre includes films such as John Huston 's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), Alfred Hitchcock 's Spellbound (1945), and Billy Wilder 's Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). The trend had all but disappeared by the mid 1950s, but a few outstanding examples continued to be made, including Roman Polanski 's Chinatown (1974) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982).