My natural inclination is to say 40s-50s and let it go at that. This would get you from Stranger on the 3rd Floor (Boris Ingster) to Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise) or something along those lines, but Falcon and Touch are so iconic that someone trying to get a handle on noir might be better served by that take.

However, there are those who don't consider Falcon to be noir at all. In fact, there are those who say noir doesn't even begin till '44 and calls it a day in '53. In the final analysis, the choice of bookends is a reflection of our individual needs and neuroses. There are those who need to keep things tight and those who need plenty of space around the edges, and their feelings on the subject are often intense. Well, more so on the tight side than the loose, I should think.

Recently, the movie Blast of Silence was unearthed. This is a fine low-budget number which was originally released in '61, and is now sometimes touted as the end of the noir cycle. Even given my open-ended tendencies, '61 seems a bit late so I think of it as an artifact of the dawn of neo-noir along with some of the new-wave entries of that time, notably Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player.

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