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We relished the opportunity to hunt for classic film noir on the Web. A search on "film noir screenplays" turned up some fascinating cinema sites, but produced little in the way of free scripts. Let's backtrack for a moment and define what we're looking for. The Internet Movie Database describes film noir as featuring "brooding characters, corruption, detectives, and the seedy side of the big city," while the informative German-Hollywood Connection tells us that the term is commonly associated with the era between 1940 and 1959. Next, we browsed the Connection's noir
filmography as well as a list of over 400 noir films from the IMDb. The first filmography was shorter and matched up well with your parameters. We used it to continue our search for free screenplays. Our first stop was Yahoo!'s non-commercial Screenplays category. From there we headed to Drew's Scripts-O-Rama -- the sunglasses next to the entry told us that this resource was recommended by Yahoo!'s Surfing department. The Script-o-rama, an archive of movie and television screenplays available on the Net, primarily focuses on newer movies, but we did locate links to scripts
for Casablanca (1942), Citizen Kane (1940), Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), and To Have and Have Not (1944). These movies are masterpieces, though not necessarily typical of the noir genre, despite their appearance on the lists we consulted. Another site for screewriters, Scriptdude, offers a collection of over 100 screenplays in Adobe Portable Document format (.pdf), but again, the featured
films tend to be contemporary releases. Alas, there are many great works that are still inaccessible via the Internet, for free or for money. Hopefully, online screenplay collections will continue to grow, as time goes by...
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