One of the most influential film movements in the 1940's was a genre that is known today as film noir. French film critics who noticed the trend of how dark and black films appeared coined the term "film noir." The criminal, violence or greed elements in film noir were a metaphoric symptom of society's evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict. It is a style of American films that first evolved in the 1940s, …showed first 75 words of 2008 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2008 total…other devices, The Maltese Falcon was able to spawn a new generation of movies that personified the femme fatales' and the hardboiled protagonists. In modern times, an array of films has film noir conventions in them, such as L.A. Confidential and The Usual Suspects. This just proves that the genre has never died and recently, within the past decade, a new noir set of films has arisen looking for the success its predecessors established.