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The third edition (1992) boasts more than 300 films from the classic period, then adds another 49 overlooked titles in an appendix. By 2003, Michael Keaney had identified more than twice the total offered by Silver and Ward in his Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era (1940–1959). That’s right, seven-hundred-forty-five. It is no coincidence that the number of titles described as film noir has expanded with the growth of film studies. Since a finite number of movies were produced between 1940 and 1959, perhaps the archeological search for more titles is nearing an end. Of course, that range of years applies only to cycle advocates. Genre and style advocates have a virtual bottomless pit of films available to them.
Film noir, as a term, was born during the summer of 1946, when French critics reacted to what they considered a new type of Hollywood crime film. The Maltese Falcon; Laura; Double Indemnity; Murder, My Sweet; and The Woman in the Window, though released over three years in the United States, arrived in close proximity in Paris and formed the first wave. A few months later, This Gun for Hire (1942), The Killers (1946), The Lady in the Lake (1947), Gilda (1946), and The Big Sleep (1946) appeared. There was something remarkable, however difficult to define, about these films, that set them apart from other suspenseful crime melodramas. The authors of the first full-length book on film noir recognized this difference and were far more discriminating than their film studies descendants about which titles met the standard for inclusion. Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, French authors of Panorama du Film Noir Americain (1955), were film enthusiasts who came to their positions through extensive movie viewing. They did not create a theory, and then admit all films that met elements of that definition. Borde and Chaumeton watched numerous films from the period, and then developed an admittedly subjective sense of which films were at the center and which were at the periphery. Unfortunately, their classifications are too vague to be appropriated for this discussion.
In Dark Cinema (1984), Jon Tuska argues for the distinction between movies that belong to the category of film noir and others that employ the noir visual style but do not belong. According to Tuska, the difference between film noir, film gris (gray film), and melodrama lies in the narrative resolution (177).