Dark Passage (1947) as locus of film noir
Dark Passage is an extended metaphor for the anti-communist witch-hunting in the USA during the 1940s and ’50s.
Humphrey Bogart
The Key Largo hypothesis: Brooks and Huston set the noir context
My hypothesis that Huston’s Key Largo defined and limited the territory of film noir as exclusively American and subtly ‘New Deal’ political.
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The film in which Humphrey Bogart made the hard-boiled detective persona his own.