Name: Squad 36
Director: Olivier Marchal

The crime film is usually told as a parade of masterpieces, but its history reads better as a series of workarounds. Every time the rules changed about what a criminal could do on screen, and get away with, the genre found a new shape: first in shadow, then in blood, and lately in stories borrowed from other countries. That adaptability is why a genre built on killers, thieves and crooked cops has produced some of cinema’s most honoured films.

At its simplest, a crime film puts the criminal act, and the people who commit, investigate or suffer it, at the centre of the story. Hollywood’s first great version was the gangster picture: Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and Scarface made stars of Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney and Paul Muni as hoodlums audiences rooted for. That glamour is what brought in the censors. Once the Production Code Administration under Joseph Breen took charge, no film could play American theatres without its seal of approval, and crime had to be seen not to pay.

Film noir grew up inside those limits. Most critics date the classic cycle from John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958): hard-boiled stories from writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, shot in low-key black and white on wet city streets. Its look owed much to European émigrés such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder, whose Double Indemnity adapted Cain. Its name came from Paris: in 1946 the critic Nino Frank, writing in L’Écran français, applied the label to the American thrillers that reached France after the Occupation.

Europe also sent new tools back. Jules Dassin, blacklisted in Hollywood, made Rififi in France and won Best Director at Cannes in 1955; its centrepiece, a heist of roughly half an hour played in near silence, became the template the heist film still follows. At home the Code was crumbling. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) ended in a burst of violence the old rules would never have passed, and in November 1968 the industry replaced the Code with a ratings system.

The new freedom produced the decade that still defines the genre’s prestige. The French Connection and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather won back-to-back Best Picture Oscars, and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, written by Robert Towne, recast noir in colour, the model critics would call neo-noir. Two decades later Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d’Or in 1994, rebuilt the form again around voice-over, pop soundtracks and, in Tarantino’s case, scrambled chronology.

The latest shift is geographic. Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong thriller directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, became Scorsese’s The Departed, which won Best Picture and gave him his first Oscar for directing. In 2004 a Cannes jury led by Tarantino gave Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy the Grand Prix. France’s polar tradition runs on as well: Olivier Marchal, who served in the police before directing 36 Quai des Orfèvres, now makes police thrillers such as Squad 36 for Netflix.

The genre Hollywood built under a censor’s seal was named by a French critic, and one of its most decorated American films of this century is a Boston retelling of a Hong Kong thriller. The crime film has always done its best work smuggled across a border.