Film Noir is a slippery concept to define. Is it a genre, a style, an
atmosphere, a mood or a look? Must a Film Noir be shot in black and white? Film historians have argued about these and related issues for years without ever arriving at a consensus, which may be diluting the concept beyond reason. Most critics, however, would accept that noir western (Pursued), noir costume dramas (The Black Book), and even the occasional British noir film (Night and the City), can be legitimately admitted to the canon.
Deciding when Hollywood noir started is equally problematic. Its origins are traced back to the shadowy, angled, paranoid world of German Expressionism. and certainly such refugees from Nazism as Fritz Lang, Karl Freund and Robert Siodmak brought with them visual and thematic elements that fed into and darkened, the Hollywood mainstream. This generation of European filmmakers recognized the medium’s potential to create complex psychological effects while exploiting controversial subject matter – something already intrinsic to the work of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, who produced his debut noir, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ in 1943. Fritz Lang’s ‘M’, about serial child killer, is among one of the earliest crime films to marry a noirish visual style with a noir-type plot. The German thriller starred the archetypal noir actor Peter Lorre in an insidiously disturbing performance; it also featured a voice-over narration, a device that was to become a hallmark of the genre. Another of Lang’s films, ‘You Only Live Once’, with its doomed young couple (Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney) on the run from fate and the law, also seems to prefigure aspects of Film Noir. Yet neither of these works conveys the sense of existential claustrophobia, of all-enveloping duplicity that distinguishes the quintessential noir.
Another candidate sometimes proposed as the first Hollywood Film Noir is ‘Stranger on the Third Floor’, a twisty, atmospheric thriller, again starring the European exile Peter Lorre. Yet ‘Stranger on the Third Floor’ was only a 64-minute B-movie, directed by the little-known Boris Ingster, despite being photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, one of noir’s finest cinematographers, it exerted little influence at the time. The film with the strongest claim to have kicked off the Hollywood noir cycle is the crime thriller ‘The Maltese Falcon’, although its makers had no intention of starting a trend, let alone inaugurating one of the most analyzed. admired and influential cycles in the history of cinema.
‘Stranger on the Third Floor‘ is often cited as the first “true” film noir of the classic period (1940–1959), though other films that fit the genre such as ‘Rebecca’ and ‘They Drive by Night‘ were released earlier. Nonetheless, it has many of the hallmarks of film noir: an urban setting, heavy shadows, diagonal lines, voice-over narration, a dream sequence, low camera angles shooting up multi-story staircases, and an innocent protagonist desperate to clear himself after being falsely accused of a crime.
The film premiered in New York City on October 3, 1941, and was nominated for three Academy Awards. Considered one of the greatest films of all time, it was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress to be included in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. It is a part of Roger Ebert’s series The Great Movies and was cited by Panorama du Film Noir Américain as the first major film noir.
The elusiveness of the genre can be traced partly to the fact that it became known as noir only after the event. The concept is an ex-post-facto historical construct, akin to expressions such as the ‘Middle Ages’. Filmmakers who created Westerns, or swashbucklers, or biopics knew exactly what conventions they were working in; few, if any, of the people who made noir films would have referred to their work as such The concept ‘Film Noir’ was devised by French movie critics who, noting a new trend emerging in the US movies that reached France en masse after the German occupation in World War II, named it after the popular policier imprint known as ‘Serie Noire’. The term was coined to denote a dark and downbeat underworld of crime and corruption: French Critic Nino Frank first used the term in 1946. However outside France, the words ‘Film Noir’ did not enter popular parlance until the 1960s.
The classic period of Hollywood Film Noir coincides with the war years and the post-war anti-Communist witch-hunt. Noir, with its pervasive atmosphere of fear and paranoia and sense of hopeless fatalism, presents an oblique response to the political climate of the time. In many noir films, it is possible to detect anxiety about the conflict engulfing Europe, which would eventually draw in the United States-or, in later years, about the Cold War claustrophobia choking the whole country as well as the threat of nuclear annihilation. John Huston made ‘The Maltese Falcon’ before the United States entered World War II; yet within it can be detected, submerged beneath the private eye conventions, an apprehension of events in Europe. ‘The Third Man’, directed by Carol Reed and set and filmed in post-war Vienna, is steeped in the messy aftermath of World War II and reflects the prevailing ambience of anxiety, pessimism and suspicion. Occupied Vienna is ruled by four different military powers, while a black market drugs racket plagues the devastated city Urban landscapes often provided the setting for Film Noir. The shadowy wet streets of the metropolis provided the perfect setting for the nightmarish events and uneasy atmosphere of noir.
Favorite noir techniques included low-key chiaroscuro lighting. odd camera angles, the use of flashbacks, first-person voice-over narration, sharp wisecracking dialogue and non-linear plotlines, Cinematographers of the era such as Nicholas Musuraca John F Seitz and John Alton, used expressionist lighting to create mood and heighten tension Arthur Edeson in particular is credited with creating the classic noir look. He shot his first feature in 9i4 and went on to film several of Douglas Fairbanks’s swashbucklers and the early sound movie ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. Also in the 1930s he photographed classic Universal horror films directed by James Whale, ‘The Old Dark House’ and ‘The Invisible Man’, whose combination of German Expressionism with shadowy got mood and tongue-in-cheek melodrama was to establish the template for horror movies In 1941, Edeson was director of photography on ‘The Maltese Falcon’.
The plots and themes of Film Noir have their pulp novels and crime fiction of the period, whose tone carried over to resulting dialogue ‘Double Indemnity’, another noir classic was adapted by director Billy Wilder and author Raymond Chandler from the novel by James M. Cain. Chandler’s writing inspired several mar noirs, including ‘The Big Sleep’.
In ‘Double Indemnity’, Walter Nerfed (Fred MacMurray) opens his narration with the line “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” Neff becomes embroiled in a murder plot by the scheming Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). Noir females are archetypes: either dutiful loving women or femmes fatales-gorgeous, mysterious, double-crossing and ready to do anything to stay on top.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the tone of Film Noir deepened. The shadows grew gloomier and more encroaching, the highlights brasher and more hysterical, and the camera angles more vertiginous, while the sense of fatalism intensified and became ever more internalized. ‘Fate or some mysterious force’ muses the hero of ‘Detour’, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all other traumas of the period clouded the texture anti-Communist paranoia, disorientation and the post-war mood of emptiness. ‘Crossfire’ flags up the potential for violence in de-mobbed veterans, the lingering specter of Nazism emerges in ‘Notorious’; a nagging worry about what wives and girlfriends got up to on the home front festers in ‘The Blue Dahlia’; and alcoholism, an increasing problem in post-war America, all but wipes out the hero of ‘The Lost Weekend’.
The audacious ‘Touch of Evil’ by Orson Welles marks the end of the US Film-Noir cycle. A lurid tale of corruption in a sleazy border town, it features Charlton Heston as an honorable Mexican narcotics agent, Marlene Dietrich as a cigar-smoking bordello madam and Welles as a degenerate US cop. The film is famed for its 3-minute unbroken opening shot and its final chase, featuring extravagant visual and experimental sound effects.
As the United States slipped deeper into the neuroses of the Cold War, noir’s downbeat, doom-laden visions seemed like a riposte, a disenchanted flipside to the optimism and flag-waving piety of much of Hollywood’s output Those patriotic parades on Main Street had their sardonic counterpart in the mean streets, the brighter the lights and the louder the drums, the darker the shadows and the more hollow the echoes. As film historian Colin McArthur commented, “The meanings spoken by Film Noir are not social relating to the problems of a particular society, but metaphysical, having to do with angst and loneliness as essential elements of the human condition”.
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