What is film noir? Sounds like an easy question….but it turns out that is a very complicated question with many different answers from many different people. Here is my strange way I define film noir. The beginning of David Lynch’s modern day film noir classic, Blue Velvet (1986), shows a white picket fence…bright red and yellow roses…school kids happily walking to school…..a man happily watering his lawn while inside his wife is drinking coffee watching television…basically your wholesome Leave It To Beaver home. This was how the most popular movies of the 1930s and 1940s showed life….All sweet and innocent from the Abbott and Costello movies to Bing Crosby’s Father O’Malley movies.
Well just when you think all is right in this Lynch world…..the water hose the man was using gets tangled up….the water pressure starts forcing the water out of the spigot… suddenly the man has a seizure and falls down. Lynch’s camera then dives into the grass and, at the roots, finds a swarm of ravenous black bugs. The savage world of the bugs was right beneath the noses of everybody in this peaceful and serene neighborhood. That is what a film noir movie is to me. They are movies that show unscrupulous people doing unscrupulous things right beneath the surface of the Leave It To Beaver crowd. Movies like Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy and Kiss of Death showed women using sex to manipulate men to get their way and showed men using violence to get their way.
Ok…enough of my thoughts on film noir. Last week I wrote a page that took a statistical look at over 260 film noir movies. Well through some comments and some constructive criticism it was suggested I fine tune my list of film noir movies. In my previous page I used 11 film noir sources. If a movie was mentioned in 5 of those sources it made the page. For this updated page….we found 3 more sources and used the criteria that the movie had to be mentioned in 10 different sources. This knocked my list of film noir movies down to 108. I then whittled that 108 to the following 100 Film Noir movies. There are lots of stats for each movie…including box office grosses, critic and audience reviews, awards and yearly box office rank. Hope you enjoy this page.
Top 100 Film Noir Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Top 100 Film Noir movies by the stars or director of movie.
- Sort Top 100 Film Noir movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Top 100 Film Noir movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Top 100 Film Noir movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each Top 100 Film Noir movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Film Noir movie won.
- Sort Top 100 Film Noir movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
And finally: This is obviously not every single film noir movie ever made. There are 1000s and 1000s of movies that many people consider film noir. So are you thinking….250 Film Noir movies is nice but I want more. Then check out this wonderful Film Noir page by the people at TheCinemaCafe.com. Plundering The Genre: Film Noir.
Where’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Gotta be one of the best Noirs of all time
Hey Alan.. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is loaded with great film noir movies….but it fell out of the timeline we used. I think I got introduced to many of those classic movies when I saw Martin and Reiner’s movie in the early 1980s.
it is a shame that Dark City is listed as 100 , I would put that in the top 20 at least
Hey Jeff….one of my friends is a huge Charlton Heston fan…and he agrees with you 100%.
Gilda? Not that good a movie.
Hey David Don I like Gilda…but The Big Heat is easily my favorite Glenn Ford movie.
That guy would call SECRETARIAT a cheap plater. Look at his ratings for OUT OF The PAST and ASPHALT JUNGLE
I met Secretariat once and he seemed like quite a ham for the camera… could’ve been a Noir Horse if he’d been hatched earlier… his jewel records still stand today and his Belmont record will never be broken… I also have a ‘plate’ with him on it ;^) OMG, got carried away there with the greatest racehorse – DBL Indemnity is a great movie but not as great as either OOtP or Asphalt Jungle(maybe Secretariat could’ve been standing over Dix at the end)
Very cool…..when I was younger…I too…got the chance to see Secretariat….she was stabled right down the road in good old Virginia…when I was growing up.
Hey Donna…..on my big film noir page…the default setting is critic and audience….and both Asphalt and Out Of The Past have Top 15 spots…and that is with over 500 film noir movies. For Film Noir the critic/audience column is the best way to sort all of these great movies. https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/film-noir-movies/
Great list
Thank you Jordan.