4. The Noir
Films about mysteries and shady individuals on both sides of the law are as old as the medium itself, but in the forties and fifties, a distinctive style of crime drama began to emerge in Hollywood. With low key visual styles, cynical antihero protagonists and melodramatic plots, noir films brought out the best of directors such as John Huston, whose Maltese Falcon, Key Largo and Asphalt Jungle, the former of two of which starred Humphrey Bogart, are amongst the genre's finest offerings. Hollywood operates in cycles, however, and by the late fifties noir was on the decline, replaced by things such as the aforementioned 'creature feature', which was replaced by things such as science fiction in the sixties and seventies, which was then in turn replaced by big budget action films in the eighties, and so on and so forth. Though the likes of sci-fi and action films will always live on because of their mass appeal, noir's reliance on suspense rather than impressive visual sequences has confined it to the fringes of contemporary cinema. Every now and again, a great film comparable in style to The Big Sleep or Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train does come along, only to quickly become forgotten due to a lack of explosions and whatnot. A distinctive style of noir has begun to emerge in Scandinavia in recent years, meanwhile, particularly in print, though it remains to be seen whether the likes of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy are simply part of another fad.