Main Characters

One main characteristic of film noir is that its main character is often not much of a hero, but rather an anti-hero. This detective is often trapped into doing some pretty bad stuff, and he is left to get himself out of trouble and find a life for himself again. He is depressed, spends a lot of time walking through dark cities at night in a fedora, and always seems to lose. The story often was told from the perspective of the hard-boiled detective, and it was not at all uncommon to begin the film with a scene from the end of the plot, and then flash back to the beginning of the whole story for him to tell it as the narrator

The other main character who was present in most every film noir was the femme fatale, a typically blonde woman whose name spelled trouble. These women with guns were empowering, deceptive, and just plain mean. They always seemed to manage to trap the hard-boiled detective into falling in love with them, just to come in at the last second and turn his world upside-down.