Abstract
Film scholars agree that classic film noir emerges most prominently in the early 1940s withThe Maltese Falcon(John Huston, 1941) andThe Big Sleep(Howard Hawks, 1946), and lasts untilTouch of Evil(Orson Welles, 1958), setting the basic template: a hard-boiled detective in trench coat and fedora investigates a murder, interviews suspects, encounters a dangerous and beautiful femme fatale, navigates through a labyrinth to solve a mystery, and kills the killer. From the 1940s to the 1970s, however, as society began to change, film noir did, too (becoming neo-noir). Social issues, like race and gender, start to play