Hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir are almost exclusively aligned with the desires for money and sex, two mirrored conditions of a fragile human economy. The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1944) certainly rely upon economic issues in their adaptations from the Hammett, Cain and Chandler novels. All three novels and their film adaptations deal with sexual exchanges for material possessions: Brigid's erotic enticements to Spade for the mysterious falcon; Phyllis's promise of amorous reward for the monetary compensation from the indemnity policy; and Mrs Grayle's lubricious invitations to Spade in order to guard her jaded secret and thereby her social position. Of course, this concupiscence as capital outlay is hardly limited to feminine desires in film noir, since Spade, Neff and Marlowe engage in this kind of self-interested manipulation for profit. Emerging during the era of the international Great Depression and the rise of global fascism, film noir often addresses the complex, paradoxical interrelationship of economics and passion. Plots and thematic structures of proto-noirs and noirs of the 1940s and well into the next decade reveal the matrix of dependency between money and sex, among them: The Big Sleep (1940), Danger Signal (1945), Fallen Angel (1945), Mildred Pierce (1945), Out of the Past (1947), Railroaded (1947), Dark Passage (1947), Thieves’ Highway (1949), Too Late for Tears (1949), Dark City (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Gun Crazy (1950) and The Big Heat (1953). Excess – financial, sexual, material – serves as a central motif in all of these films as it had in the development of the hardboiled detective genre.