When he wasn’t a truth-seeker, our protag was often a criminal, at the very least someone of ambivalent moral code or weakness, a fall-guy running out of time, and hope for redemption. The attraction was as ugly as the repulsion. Everyone was out for themselves, phonies subject to their basest fears and vices. Everyone was running some kind of scam, even the cops-especially the cops. Its characters were dirty, displaced, disillusioned, distrustful, just plain dumb. Like the ink on those yellow hard-boiled pages, film noir was a smeared affair from the start-hard to define and harder to reconcile. was linear: Talk it out, trace the clues, tell us about it with a voiceover.Įxcept it wasn’t that easy. (Had Will Hays, Joseph Breen, and their censoring kind not been around, noir would’ve been an even more nihilistic realm.) In any case, the M.O. Remember: The folks at the Hollywood Production Code couldn’t handle it either, mandating changes in service of propriety, i.e., social conformity. It’s not overreaching to read all of this from the 300 or so titles generally considered the classic noir canon. Put the femme fatale in her place, show the girl-the world-who’s boss. Extrapolated to the off-screen world, the logic was, solve the crime, solve the problem. Unless they were a good, subservient girl, women were brazen, sexual bitches, more often than not smarter, and more powerful, than the guys-at least at the outset. You couldn’t say the same for the ladies, what with that Madonna-whore complex running rampant through noir’s icky Freudian gender dynamics. All that paranoia and pathos, before the second Red Scare.Įnter the private detective and his antihero ilk-a scarred, brooding fella who for his considerable flaws was sympathetic. The roles were reversed, the world was upside down. Homes they didn’t recognize, communities that had gone on in their absence, workplaces that no longer needed them, and wives who weren’t dependent on them anymore. Think about it: As the classic period of noir, generally regarded as 1940-58, wore on, more jaded and pessimistic, shell-shocked soldiers were returning to a forever changed urban and suburban landscape. Life had grown profoundly strange for its first-generation audience … off-balance, alienating, lonely. Noir is a state of mind, of subconscious, a fever dream, an existential crisis. Some define noir as or by a tone, and it’s very much a mood, a sensibility. Though its blueprints were everywhere, noir forged its own language, its own playbook, its own universe. We talk about noir plotting and tropes, but in fact it drew liberally from the gangster pics of the Depression/Prohibition era, crime procedurals, heist movies, horror films (again, the German Expressionist influence), romantic melodrama, Gothic thrillers, tawdry B-movies, and that other quintessentially American breed, the Western. We admire its heavily stylized approach-exaggerated camera angles, tension-crafting mise-en-scène, flashbacks, deep focus and trademark shadows-but also its neo-realist and documentary-like experiments. We think of a never-ending, rain-soaked night-sunlight replaced with neon and nocturnal reflections, the optical trickery of mirrors and shadows-but in contrast, the days of noir scorched its characters. and N.Y.C.-set saga, there’s a small, heartland tragedy. We think of noirs as urban stories, but that’s not always the case-for every L.A. See, noir didn’t play by any rules, not really. International directors like Fritz Lang, Michael Curtiz, and Robert Siodmak, who’d honed the dramatic visuals of German Expressionism, fled their war-torn homes for the plentiful opportunities in Tinseltown.īut things get complicated here, and fast.
The men-including the screenwriters-had gone off to fight, and as the women stepped up, into the public sector and newfound independence, studio chiefs turned to the fast-and-cheap pulp mysteries of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Noir was nothing if not a reaction, a reflection of a nation reeling from despicable evil overseas and revolutionary upheaval on the domestic front.
Is it a genre? A subgenre? A movement? A trend? A commentary? A style? For the purposes of this introduction, let’s call it a response. Since its coining in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank, who observed from afar something dark, quite literally, going on at the American cinema, the term “film noir” has been debated and debated and debated some more.
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