"Mother of God,is this the end of Rico!" Edward G.Robinson's memorable exit line in Little Caesar (1930) was the start of a new phenomenon - the talkie - that glorified criminals while reminding its audience that Crime Does Not Pay.

Little Caesar was a taut gangster film with crackling dialogue and a superb central performance. It was followed by The Public Enemy (1931),which established James Cagney as one of the greatest screen hoods of them all, strutting around like a bantam cock and pushing grapefruit into the face of his moll.
By the end of the decade,George Raft and Humphrey Bogart were also card-carrying Hollywood villains with a huge public following.

In the 1940's film crime turned noir, drawing heavily on the novels of such hard-boiled writers as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett,James M.Cain and Cornell Woolrich.
The Maltese Falcon (1941),superbly cast and directed by John Huston, marked Bogart’s change from villain into (tarnished) hero - and into an unqualified star. The following year audiences saw Hammett’s The Glass Key and two Chandler adaptations.

Time To Kill was based on The High Window. The Falcon Takes Over was Chandler's Farewell,My Lovely curiously transposed into the Falcon crime series created by Michael Arlen and featuring debonair detective Gay Falcon, played by George Sanders.

The Fallen Sparrow (1943) was based on a novel by the late Dorothy B.Hughes in hard-boiled mode,a rare example of a woman competing successfully in a male-dominated field. Ride The Pink Horse (1947) was another of her novels to be adapted for the screen.

But the most famous films of this period are the peerless Double Indemnity (1944),directed by Billy Wilder from a screenplay,based on James M.Cainís novel,written by Wilder and Chandler; Mildred Pierce (1945),also based on a Cain novel,with an Oscar-winning performance by Joan Crawford; The Big Sleep (1946),the best adaptation of a Chandler novel and another triumph for Bogart; The Blue Dahlia (1946),starring Alan Ladd in a terse screenplay by Chandler,based on a Woolrich novel; and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946),yet another James M.Cain novel transposed to the screen.

Most memorable of all,of course,was Casablanca (1942) which managed both to celebrate and subvert the genre, turning Bogart into a romantic hero and giving us some of the best-quoted lines in cinematic history.

Too young to see any of these films when they were first released, I had, as a boy, a bedroom wall that was adorned with autographed photos of their stars and endless film annuals to keep me abreast of their work.

But once I mastered the technique of looking and sounding much older than I really was, I was able to get into any cinema. Gone were the juvenile diversions of Laurel and Hardy, Danny Kaye and Tarzan. The whole world of the crime film opened up. They were rites of passage. The first I recall seeing was The Big Heat (1953) in which Glenn Ford plays a rogue cop, pursuing, among others, the snarling Lee Marvin. In The Public Enemy, all Mae Clarke suffered was a grapefruit in the kisser. In The Big Heat Gloria Grahame has a cup of scalding coffee thrown over her face by Marvin. It was a defining moment in Fritz Lang's brilliant film. In other hands, The Big Heat could have been trite and predictable. Lang gave it an edge and a quality that few of his imitators have matched.

The Night Of The Hunter (1955), indifferently received at the time but now regarded as a classic, is another film which vibrates in the memory. It was Charles Laughton's only directorial outing and he used many of Lang's techniques,though not slavishly. What struck me at the time was the sheer excitement and sense of danger which it generated. No director coaxed a better performance out of Mitchum.

Others spring to mind: the classic courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959); Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), in which Burt Lancaster paid tribute to lifer Robert Stroud; Sidney Lumetís The Deadly Affair (1966), my favourite adaptation from John le Carre; Arthur Pennís Bonnie and Clyde (1967) with its superb support playing from Gene Hackman, Michael J.Pollard and Estelle Parsons; and Play Misty For Me (1971),Clint Eastwood's first film as director/star and still one of his best.

Then there’s the immortal Chinatown (1974) in which Jack Nicholson profited from the inventive direction of Roman Polanski; and John Miliusís Dillinger (1973) in which Warren Oates was an inspired choice.

All these films were first enjoyed in the shared experience of cinema but each now has a place in my video library. My collection of film noir has reached such proportions that my children have had to institute an annual cull.

But there are some titles which will never be removed and which every serious fan should own. The Godfather trilogy is seminal even though its third element is such a disappointment. Francis Ford Coppola created one of the miracles of the genre, allowing Al Pacino to develop the talent which has been seen to such good effect in Sea of Love (1989) and Donnie Brasco (1997), two other untouchable items in my collection - as indeed is The Untouchables (1987) itself, Brian de Palma's searing portrait of Chicago in the thirties.

I sometimes have whole weekends of Hitchcock or watch a sequence of prison films - from I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (1932) to The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - or enjoy the affectionate send up in Carl Reinerís Dead Men Donít Wear Plaid (1982).

I have probably watched Miller's Crossing (1990) more times than the Coen brothers and I play endlessly with Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), trying to make the pieces of the jigsaw fit. Just when you think you've seen it all, along comes a movie like LA Confidential (1997) or The Big Lebowski (1998) to redefine the genre in new and beguiling ways.