The French film critic Nino Frank is often given credit for bringing the term “film noir” into general use. He used it to describe a group of US crime films that were shown in French theaters in the summer of 1946, including John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, Otto Preminger’s Laura, Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, and Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window.

The term "film noir" had been used in French film reviews and newspaper articles in 1938 and 1939, in reference to French films such as Quai des brumes (1937) by Marcel Carné and La Bête humaine (1938) by Jean Renoir, both starring Jean Gabin.

It may have been inspired by the publisher Gallimard’s Série Noire, a series of crime novels by Hammett, Chandler, and others, released in France, before the war.