Film noir the most influential of the early noirs. A slew of now-renowned noir "bad girls" followed, such as those played by Rita Hayworth in "Gilda" (1946), Lana Turner in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946), Ava Gardner in "The Killers" (1946), and Jane Greer in "Out of the Past" (1947). The iconic noir counterpart to the femme fatale, the private eye, came to the fore in films such as "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, and "Murder, My Sweet" (1944), with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe. The prevalence of the private eye as a lead character declined
Lana Turner as an actress has divided critics: Upon Turner's death, John Updike wrote in "The New Yorker" that she "was a faded period piece, an old-fashioned glamour queen whose fifty-four films, over four decades didn't amount, retrospectively to much ... As a performer, she was purely a studio-made product." Defenders of Turner's acting ability, such as Jessica Hope Jordan and James Robert Parish, cite her performance in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" as an argument for the value of her work. Her role in the film has also resulted in her being frequently associated with film noir and the femme fatale