Looking for hommes fatales is like looking at the current spirit of America in 2025, where crooked members of the legal and business community would fit right in with these mugs, killers, jerks, and heels. Not all here are murderers, but none of them cared who dies, be it at their hands, by their orders, or it was just the price of doing business. As Lee J. Cobb says to the longshoremen regarding a battered Marlo Brando in On The Waterfront – “You want him, you got him”, so here they are. Most of them didn't need much help from a femme fatale, and not a one of them would you want to bend an elbow with at the Noir Bar.

Humphrey Bogart – In A Lonely Place
Bogey again – Treasure of the Sierra Madre (which I consider noir)
Albert Dekker – The Pretender
Louis Calhern – The Asphalt Jungle
Robert Ryan – Clash By Night
Kirk Douglas – Ace In The Hole
Lee J. Cobb – Thieves Highway
Dennis O’Keefe – Woman On The Run
John Garfield – Force Of Evil
Richard Widmark – Night and the City
Burt Lancaster – Sweet Smell Of Success
Raymond Burr – Pitfall
Burr again – Raw Deal
Van Heflin – The Prowler (rogue cop)
Dana Andrews – Where The Sidewalk Ends (another rogue cop)
Edward G. Robinson – All My Sons
Frank Conroy – The Ox-Bow Incident (the leader of a revenge-fueled posse).
Claude Rains – Notorious (The list has to have at least one Nazi spy)
Hume Cronyn – Brute Force
Lloyd Bridges – Try And Get Me (a dandy of pure evil personified)
Tully Marshall – This Gun For Hire
Howard Da Silva – Border Incident
Steve Cochran – The Chase
Herbert Marshall – The High Wall
Alexander Knox – Two Of A Kind