Film Noir

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This still from The Big Combo (1955) demonstrates the visual style of film noir at its most extreme. John Alton, the film's cinematographer, created many of the iconic images of film noir.

Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize moral ambiguity and sexual motivation. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression.

The term film noir (French for "black film"), first applied to Hollywood movies by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, was unknown to most American film industry professionals of the era. Cinema historians and critics defined the canon of film noir in retrospect; many of those involved in the making of the classic noirs later professed to be unaware of having created a distinctive type of film.

Noir—What is it?

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The New York Times described how the "moods and tensions" in the British private-eye parody Pulp came "out of the collective depths of the film noir"—the phrase's first appearance in the paper. It was February 1973.

Film noirs embrace a variety of genres, from the gangster film to the police procedural to the so-called social problem picture, and evidence a variety of visual approaches, from meat-and-potatoes Hollywood mainstream to outré. While many critics refer to film noir as a genre itself, others argue that it can be no such thing. Though noir is often associated with an urban setting, for example, many classic noirs take place mainly in small towns, suburbia, rural areas, or on the open road, so setting can not be its genre determinant, as with the Western. Similarly, while the private eye and the femme fatale are character types conventionally identified with noir, the majority of film noirs feature neither, so there is no character basis for genre designation as with the gangster film. Nor does it rely on anything as evident as the monstrous or supernatural elements of the horror film, the speculative leaps of the science fiction film, or the song-and-dance routines of the musical.

However, because of the diversity of noir, certain scholars in the field, such as film historian Thomas Schatz, treat it as not a genre but a "style." Alain Silver, the most widely published American critic specializing in film noir studies, refers to it as a "cycle" and a "phenomenon," even as he argues that it has—like certain genres—a consistent set of visual and thematic codes. Other critics treat film noir as a "mood," a "movement," or a "series," or simply address a chosen set of movies from the "period." There is no consensus on the matter.

The prehistory of noir

Film noir has sources not only in cinema but other artistic media as well. The low-key lighting schemes commonly linked with the classic mode are in the tradition of chiaroscuro and tenebrism, techniques using high contrasts of light and dark developed by 15th- and 16th-century painters associated with Mannerism and the Baroque. Film noir's aesthetics are deeply influenced by German Expressionism, a cinematic movement of the 1910s and 1920s closely related to contemporaneous developments in theater, photography, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The opportunities offered by the booming Hollywood film industry and, later, the threat of growing Nazi power led to the emigration of many important film artists working in Germany who had either been directly involved in the Expressionist movement or studied with its practitioners. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Michael Curtiz brought dramatic lighting techniques and a psychologically expressive approach to mise-en-scène with them to Hollywood, where they would make some of the most famous of classic noirs. Lang's 1931 masterwork, the German M, is among the first major crime films of the sound era to join a characteristically noirish visual style with a noir-type plot, one in which the protagonist is a criminal (as are his most successful pursuers). M was also the occasion for the first star performance by Peter Lorre, who would go on to act in several formative American noirs of the classic era.

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The "original" femme fatale, Marlene Dietrich, complete with noir-regulation cigarette, in a publicity shot for Josef von Sternberg's mordant melodrama Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel; 1930).

By 1931, Curtiz had already been in Hollywood for half a decade, making as many as six films a year. Movies of his such as 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) and Private Detective 62 (1933) are among the early Hollywood sound films arguably classifiable as noir. Giving Expressionist-affiliated moviemakers particularly free stylistic rein were Universal horror pictures such as Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932)—the former photographed and the latter directed by the Berlin-trained Karl Freund—and The Black Cat (1934), directed by Austrian émigré Edgar G. Ulmer. The Universal horror that comes closest to noir, both in story and sensibility, however, is The Invisible Man (1933), directed by Englishman James Whale and shot by American Carl Laemmle Jr.

The Vienna-born but largely American-raised Josef von Sternberg was directing in Hollywood at the same time. Films of his such as Shanghai Express (1932) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), with their hothouse eroticism and baroque visual style, specifically anticipate central elements of classic noir. The commercial and critical success of Sternberg's silent Underworld in 1927 was largely responsible for spurring a trend of Hollywood gangster films. Popular movies in the genre such as Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) demonstrated that there was an audience for crime dramas with morally reprehensible protagonists.

An important, and possibly influential, cinematic antecedent to classic noir was 1930s French poetic realism, with its romantic, fatalistic attitude and celebration of doomed heroes; an acknowledged influence on certain trends in noir was 1940s Italian neorealism, with its emphasis on quasi-documentary authenticity.

A few movies now considered noir strove to depict comparatively ordinary protagonists with unspectacular lives in a manner occasionally evocative of neorealism—the most famous example is The Lost Weekend (1945), directed by Billy Wilder, yet another Vienna-born, Berlin-trained American auteur. (In turn, one of the primary influences on neorealism was the 1930 German film Menschen am Sonntag, codirected and cowritten by Siodmak, cowritten by Wilder, and codirected and produced by Ulmer.) Among those movies not themselves considered film noirs, perhaps none had a greater effect on the development of the genre than America's own Citizen Kane (1941), the landmark motion picture directed by Orson Welles. Its Sternbergian visual intricacy and complex, voiceover-driven narrative structure are echoed in dozens of classic film noirs.

Early literary influences

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The October 1934 issue of Black Mask featured the first appearance of the detective character whom Raymond Chandler would develop into the famous Philip Marlowe.

The primary literary influence on film noir was the hardboiled school of American detective and crime fiction, led in its early years by such writers as Dashiell Hammett (whose first novel, Red Harvest, was published in 1929) and James M. Cain (whose The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared five years later), and popularized in pulp magazines such as Black Mask. The classic film noirs The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Glass Key (1942) were based on novels by Hammett; Cain's novels provided the basis for Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Slightly Scarlet (1956; adapted from Love's Lovely Counterfeit). A decade before the classic era, a story of Hammett's was the source for the gangster melodrama City Streets (1931), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and photographed by Lee Garmes, who worked regularly with Sternberg. Wedding a style and story both with many noir characteristics, released the month before Lang's M, City Streets has a claim to being the first major film noir.

Raymond Chandler, who debuted as a novelist with The Big Sleep in 1939, soon became the most famous author of the hardboiled school. Not only were Chandler's novels turned into major noirs—Murder, My Sweet (1944; adapted from Farewell, My Lovely), The Big Sleep (1946), and Lady in the Lake (1947)—he was an important screenwriter in the genre as well, producing the scripts for Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951). Where Chandler, like Hammett, centered most of his novels and stories on the character of the private eye, Cain featured less heroic protagonists and focused more on psychological exposition than on crime solving; the Cain approach has come to be identified with a subset of the hardboiled genre dubbed "noir fiction." For much of the 1940s, one of the most prolific and successful authors of this often downbeat brand of suspense tale was Cornell Woolrich (sometimes using the pseudonyms George Hopley or William Irish). No writer's published work provided the basis for more film noirs of the classic period than Woolrich's: thirteen in all, including Black Angel (1946), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and Fear in the Night (1947).

A crucial literary source for film noir, now often overlooked, was W. R. Burnett, whose first novel to be published was Little Caesar, in 1929. It would be turned into the hit for Warner Bros. in 1931; the following year, Burnett was hired to write dialogue for Scarface, while Beast of the City was adapted from one of his stories. Some critics regard these latter two movies as film noirs, despite their early date. Burnett's characteristic narrative approach fell somewhere between that of the quintessential hardboiled writers and their noir fiction compatriots—his protagonists were often heroic in their way, a way just happening to be that of the gangster. During the classic era, his work, either as author or screenwriter, was the basis for seven movies now widely regarded as film noirs, including three of the most famous: High Sierra (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950).

The classic period

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One of the quintessential film noirs, Out of the Past (1947) features many of the genre's hallmarks: a cynical private detective as the protagonist, a sexy femme fatale, multiple flashbacks with voiceover narration, dramatic chiaroscuro photography, and a fatalistic mood leavened with provocative banter. The film stars Robert Mitchum, one of the foremost male icons of film noir.

The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir. The movie most commonly cited as the first "true" film noir is Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). While City Streets and other pre-WWII crime melodramas such as Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once (1937), both directed by Fritz Lang, are considered full-fledged noir by some critics, most categorize them as "proto-noir" or in similar terms. Many claim that there is a significant distinction between the noirs of the 1940s and those of the 1950s—other than the relative disappearance of the private eye as a lead character there is no consensus on how that distinction manifests, but it often comes down to a view that the later classic noirs tend to be more "extreme" in one way or another.

Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) is frequently cited as the last noir of the classic period. Some scholars believe film noir never really ended, but continued to transform even as the characteristic noir visual style began to seem dated and changing production conditions led Hollywood in different directions—in this view, post-1950s films in the noir tradition are seen as part of a continuity with classic noir. A majority of critics, however, regard comparable movies made outside the classic era to be something other than genuine film noirs. They regard true film noir as belonging to a temporally and geographically limited cycle or period, treating subsequent films that evoke the classics as fundamentally different due to general shifts in moviemaking style and latter-day awareness of noir as a historical source for allusion.

Most of the film noirs of the classic period were low- and modestly budgeted features without major stars (B-movies either literally or in spirit), in which writers, directors, cinematographers, and other craftsmen found themselves relatively free from the typical big-picture constraints. While enforcement of the Production Code ensured that no movie character could literally get away with murder, at the B level of noir especially, one could come awful close. Thematically, film noirs as a group were most exceptional for the relative frequency with which they centered on women of questionable virtue—a focus very rare in Hollywood films after the mid-1930s and the end of the pre-Code era. The signal movie in this vein was Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder; setting the mold was Barbara Stanwyck's unforgettable femme fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson—an apparent nod to Marlene Dietrich, who had built her extraordinary career playing such characters for Sternberg. An A-level feature all the way, the movie's commercial success and seven Oscar nominations made it probably the most influential of the early noirs; in particular, it led to a spate of what later became known as "bad girl movies."

Conventional A films, however emotionally tortuous, were ultimately expected to convey positive, reassuring messages; in terms of style, invisible camerawork and editing techniques, flattering soft lighting schemes, and deluxely trimmed sets were the rule. The makers of film noir turned all this on its head, creating sophisticated, sometimes bleak dramas tinged with mistrust, cynicism, and a sense of the absurd, in settings that were frequently either real-life urban or budget-saving minimalist, with often strikingly expressionist lighting and unsettling techniques such as wildly skewed camera angles and convoluted flashbacks. The noir style gradually influenced the mainstream—even beyond Hollywood.

Thirty-five notable American film noirs of the classic period

(with directors and significant noir performers—supporting players in italics)¹

1940–1949

• Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) d. Boris Ingster, w/ Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr.
• High Sierra (1941) d. Raoul Walsh, w/ Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, Arthur Kennedy
• The Maltese Falcon (1941) d. John Huston, w/ Bogart, Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Cook (costarring Mary Astor)
• Shadow of a Doubt (1943) d. Alfred Hitchcock, w/ Joseph Cotten
• Laura (1944) d. Otto Preminger, w/ Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb
• Double Indemnity (1944) d. Billy Wilder, w/ Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson
• The Lost Weekend (1945) d. Wilder, w/ Ray Milland
• Mildred Pierce (1945) d. Michael Curtiz, w/ Joan Crawford, Zachary Scott, Bruce Bennett
• Detour (1945) d. Edgar G. Ulmer, w/ Tim Ryan, Esther Howard, Don Brodie (starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage)
• The Big Sleep (1946) d. Howard Hawks, w/ Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Malone, Cook
• Gilda (1946) d. Charles Vidor, w/ Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready, Joseph Calleia
• The Killers (1946) d. Robert Siodmak, w/ Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene, Charles McGraw, William Conrad, Jeff Corey
• Notorious (1946) d. Hitchcock, w/ Claude Rains (starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) d. Tay Garnett, w/ Lana Turner, John Garfield, Audrey Totter
• The Stranger (1946) d. Orson Welles, w/ Robinson, Loretta Young, Welles, Erskine Sanford
• Dark Passage (1947) d. Delmer Daves, w/ Bogart, Bacall, Bennett
• The Lady from Shanghai (1947) d. Welles, w/ Hayworth, Welles, Everett Sloane, Ted de Corsia, Sanford
• Out of the Past (1947) d. Jacques Tourneur, w/ Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Steve Brodie
• Key Largo (1948) d. Huston, w/ Bogart, Robinson, Bacall, Claire Trevor, Thomas Gomez
• White Heat (1949) d. Walsh, w/ James Cagney, O'Brien, Steve Cochran, Fred Clark (costarring Virginia Mayo)

1950–1958

• The Asphalt Jungle (1950) d. Huston, w/ Sterling Hayden, Barry Kelley, Ray Teal
• D.O.A. (1950) d. Rudolph Maté, w/ O'Brien, Luther Adler
• In a Lonely Place (1950) d. Nicholas Ray, w/ Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid, Art Smith, Jeff Donnell
• Night and the City (1950) d. Jules Dassin, w/ Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Mike Mazurki [see "Film noir outside the United States" below for its status as an American noir]
• Sunset Boulevard (1950) d. Wilder, w/ William Holden, Clark, Jack Webb (costarring Gloria Swanson)
• Ace in the Hole (1951) d. Wilder, w/ Douglas, Jan Sterling, Robert Arthur, Frank Cady, Richard Benedict, Teal, Lewis Martin, Timothy Carey
• Strangers on a Train (1951) d. Hitchcock, w/ Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Kasey Rogers, John Doucette (costarring Robert Walker)
• Pickup on South Street (1953) d. Samuel Fuller, w/ Widmark, Richard Kiley, Milburn Stone
• The Big Heat (1953) d. Fritz Lang, w/ Ford, Grahame, Lee Marvin, Carolyn Jones, Doucette
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955) d. Robert Aldrich, w/ Dekker, Paul Stewart, Marian Carr, Jack Elam, Helton (starring Ralph Meeker)
• The Night of the Hunter (1955) d. Charles Laughton, w/ Mitchum, Shelley Winters (costarring Lillian Gish)
• The Killing (1956) d. Stanley Kubrick, w/ Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Cook, Marie Windsor, de Corsia, Carey, Joe Turkel, Jay Adler
• The Wrong Man (1956) d. Hitchcock, w/ Henry Fonda, Harold J. Stone (costarring Vera Miles)
• Sweet Smell of Success (1957) d. Alexander Mackendrick, w/ Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Levene, Donnell, Jay Adler
• Touch of Evil (1958) d. Welles, w/ Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Welles, Calleia, Ray Collins

For an expanded list of films considered "noir," see List of film noir

Directors and the business of noir

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A scene from In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray based on a novel by noir fiction writer Dorothy B. Hughes. Two of classic noir's defining actors, Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart, give perhaps their greatest performances as star-crossed lovers in the film.

While the inceptive Stranger on the Third Floor was an RKO B picture, directed by a virtual unknown, the preceding list of films—based primarily on enduring fame—leans heavily toward A-list productions by name-brand directors such as Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Huston (who debuted as a director with The Maltese Falcon). Otto Preminger's success with Laura made his name (he honored the debt by making two other classic Fox noirs with Dana Andrews, Fallen Angel [1945] and Where the Sidewalk Ends [1950]) and In a Lonely Place did something similar for Nicholas Ray's career (his other noirs include his debut, They Live by Night [1948], and On Dangerous Ground [1952]).

Orson Welles had notorious problems with financing, but his three film noirs were reasonably well budgeted: The Lady from Shanghai received top-level, "prestige" backing, while both The Stranger (his most conventional film) and Touch of Evil (an unmistakably personal work) were funded at levels lower but still commensurate with a headlining release. Like The Stranger, Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1945) was a production of the independent International Pictures. Lang's follow-up, the wickedly entertaining Scarlet Street (1945), was semi-independent—cosponsored by Universal and his own Diana Productions, of which the movie's costar, Joan Bennett, was the second biggest shareholder. Lang, Bennett, and her husband, Universal veteran and Diana production head Walter Wanger, would make Secret Beyond the Door (1948) in similar fashion. Before he was forced abroad for political reasons, director Jules Dassin made two classic noirs that also stradled the major/independent line: Brute Force (1947) and the influential documentary-style Naked City were developed by producer Mark Hellinger, who had an "inside/outside" contract with Universal similar to Wanger's. Years earlier, working at Warner Bros., Hellinger had produced three films for Raoul Walsh, the proto-noirs They Drive by Night (1940) and Manpower (1941) and the recognized classic High Sierra. Walsh had no great name recognition during his half-century as a working director, but his noirs—White Heat and The Enforcer (1951) would follow—had A-list stars and were of consistently high quality. In addition to the aforementioned, other directors associated with top-of-the-bill Hollywood film noirs include Edward Dmytryk (Murder, My Sweet; Crossfire [1947]), the first important noir director to fall prey to the industry blacklist, as well as Henry Hathaway (The Dark Corner [1946], Kiss of Death [1947]) and John Farrow (The Big Clock [1948], His Kind of Woman [1951]).

But again, most of the Hollywood films now considered classic noir are known as "B movies"—some in the most precise sense, produced to run on the bottom of double bills by a low-budget unit of one of the major studios or by one of the smaller, so-called Poverty Row outfits, from the relatively well-off Monogram to shakier ventures such as Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC). Jacques Tourneur had made over thirty Hollywood Bs (a few now highly regarded, most completely forgotten) before directing the A-level Out of the Past, considered by some critics the pinnacle of classic noir. Movies with budgets a step up the ladder, known as "intermediates" within the industry, might be treated as A or B pictures depending on the circumstance—Monogram created a new unit, Allied Artists, in the late 1940s to focus on this sort of production. Such films have long colloquially been referred to as B movies. Robert Wise (Born to Kill [1947], The Set-Up [1949]) and Anthony Mann (T-Men [1947], Raw Deal [1948]) each made a series of impressive intermediates, many of them noirs, before graduating to steady work on big-budget productions. Mann did some of his finest work with cinematographer John Alton, a specialist in what critic James Naremore describes as "hypnotic moments of light-in-darkness." He Walked by Night (1948), shot by Alton and, though credited solely to Alfred Werker, directed in large part by Mann, demonstrates their technical mastery and exemplifies the late 1940s trend of "police procedural" crime dramas. Put out, like other Mann–Alton noirs, by the small Eagle-Lion company, it was the direct inspiration for the Dragnet series, which debuted on radio in 1949 and television in 1951.

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Cheap at twice the price: Detour (1945) cost $117,000 to make when the biggest Hollywood studios spent around $600,000 on the average feature. But the accountants at small PRC weren't happy—it was 30% over budget.

Directors such as Samuel Fuller (cited above, also Underworld U.S.A. [1961]), Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy [1949], The Big Combo [1955]), and Phil Karlson (Kansas City Confidential [1952], The Brothers Rico [1957]) built now well-respected oeuvres largely at the B-movie/intermediate level. (Dalton Trumbo—like Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten—wrote the Gun Crazy screenplay disguised by a front while still blacklisted.) In 1945, Edgar G. Ulmer made one of the all-time noir cult classics, Detour, at PRC. A number of low and modestly budgeted films were made by independent, often actor-owned, companies contracting with one of the larger outfits for distribution. It was in this way that accomplished noir actress Ida Lupino became the sole female director in Hollywood during the late 1940s and much of the 1950s—her best-known film is The Hitch-Hiker (1953), developed by her company, The Filmakers, with support and distribution by RKO. It is one of the seven classic film noirs produced largely outside of the major studios that have been chosen to date for the United States National Film Registry; the others are Detour, Gun Crazy, D.O.A., Kiss Me Deadly, Sweet Smell of Success (the preceding four distributed by United Artists, the "studio without a studio"), and Force of Evil (1948; dist. MGM), directed by Abraham Polonsky and starring John Garfield, both of whom would be blacklisted in the 1950s. Independent production usually meant restricted circumstances, but not always—Sweet Smell of Success, for instance, despite the original plans of the production team, was clearly not made on the cheap, though like many other cherished A-budget noirs it might be said to have a B-movie soul.

Perhaps no director better displayed that spirit than the German-born Robert Siodmak, who had already made a score of films before his 1940 arrival in Hollywood. Working mostly on A features, he made eight movies now regarded as classic film noirs (a figure matched only by Lang and Mann). In addition to The Killers, Burt Lancaster's debut and a Hellinger/Universal coproduction, Siodmak's other important contributions to the genre include 1944's Phantom Lady (a top-of-the-line B and Woolrich adaptation), the ironically titled Christmas Holiday (1944), and Cry of the City (1948). Criss Cross (1949), with Lancaster again the lead, exemplifies how Siodmak brought the virtues of the B-movie to the A noir. In addition to the relatively looser constraints on character and message at lower budgets, the nature of B production lent itself to the noir style for directly economic reasons: dim lighting not only saved on electrical costs but helped cloak cheap sets (mist and smoke also served the cause); night shooting was often compelled by hurried production schedules; plots with obscure motivations and intriguingly elliptical transitions were sometimes the consequence of scripts written in haste, not every scene of which was there always time or money to shoot. In Criss Cross, Siodmak achieves all these effects with purpose, wrapping them around Yvonne De Carlo, playing the most understandable of femme fatales, Dan Duryea, in one of his deliciously charismatic villain roles, and Lancaster—already an established star—as an ordinary joe turned armed robber, a romantic obsessive on a one-way ride to ruin.

Film noir outside the United States

Some critics regard classic film noir as a cycle exclusive to the United States; e.g., Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward: "With the Western, film noir shares the distinction of being an indigenous American form...a wholly American film style." Others, however, regard noir as an international phenomenon. Even before the beginning of the generally accepted classic period, there were movies made far from Hollywood that can be seen in retrospect as film noirs, for example, the French productions Pépé le Moko (1937), directed by Jules Duvivier, and Le Jour se lève (1939), directed by Marcel Carné.

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Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows; 1958). The film features one of the most acclaimed of all noir scores, composed and performed by jazz musician Miles Davis.

During the classic period, there were many films produced outside the United States, particularly in France, that share elements of style, theme, and sensibility with American film noirs and may themselves be included in the genre's canon. In certain cases, the interrelationship with Hollywood noir is obvious: American-born director Jules Dassin moved to France in the early 1950s as a result of the Hollywood blacklist, and made one of the most famous French film noirs, Rififi (1955). Other well-known French films often classified as noir include Quai des Orfèvres (1947), Le Salaire de la peur (released in English-speaking countries as The Wages of Fear) (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955), all directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot; Casque d'or (1952) and Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), both directed by Jacques Becker; and Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958), directed by Louis Malle. French director Jean-Pierre Melville is widely recognized for his tragic, minimalist film noirs—Quand tu liras cette lettre (1953) and Bob le flambeur (1955), from the classic period, were followed by Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967), and Le Cercle rouge (1970).

A number of thrillers produced in Great Britain during the classic period are also frequently referred to as film noirs, including Contraband (1940) and The Small Back Room (1949), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; Brighton Rock (1947), directed by John Boulting; They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti; and Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), directed by Lewis Gilbert. Terence Fisher directed several low-budget thrillers in a noir mode for Hammer Film Productions, including The Last Page (aka Man Bait; 1952), Stolen Face (1952), and Murder by Proxy (aka Blackout; 1954). Before leaving for France, Jules Dassin had been obliged by political pressure to shoot his last English-language film of the classic noir period in Great Britain: Night and the City (1950), though it was conceived in the United States and was not only directed by an American but also stars two American actors (Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney), is technically a UK production, financed by 20th Century-Fox's British subsidiary. The most famous of classic British noirs is director Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), like Brighton Rock based on a Graham Greene novel. Set in Vienna immediately after World War II, it stars Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, both prominent American actors who starred in U.S. film noirs; despite being a completely British production, the movie is sometimes discussed as if it is a classic Hollywood noir.

Elsewhere, Italian director Luchino Visconti adapted Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice as Ossessione (1943), regarded both as one of the great noirs and a seminal film in the development of neorealism. (This was not even the first screen version of Cain's novel, having been preceded by the French Le Dernier tournant in 1939.) In Japan, the celebrated Akira Kurosawa directed several movies recognizable as film noirs, including Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), and High and Low (1963).

Among the first major neo-noir films—the term often applied to movies that consciously refer back to the classic noir tradition—was the French Tirez sur la pianiste (1960), directed by François Truffaut from a novel by one of the gloomiest of American noir fiction writers, David Goodis. Noir crime films and melodramas have been produced in many countries in the post-classic area, some of them quintessentially self-aware neo-noirs—for example, Il Conformista (1969; Italy), Der Amerikanische Freund (1977; Germany), The Element of Crime (1984; Denmark), As Tears Go By (1988; Hong Kong)—others simply sharing narrative elements and a version of the hardboiled sensibility associated with classic noir—The Castle of Sand (1974; Japan), Insomnia (1997; Norway), Croupier (1998; UK), Blind Shaft (2003; China).

Neo-noir and echoes of the classic mode

The 1960s and 1970s

While it is hard to draw a line between some of the noir films of the early 1960s such as Blast of Silence (1961) and Cape Fear (1962) and the noirs of the late 1950s, new trends emerged in the post-classic era. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer, Shock Corridor (1962), directed by Samuel Fuller, and Brainstorm (1965), directed by experienced noir character actor William Conrad, all treat the theme of mental dispossession within stylistic and tonal frameworks derived from classic film noir.

In a different vein, filmmakers such as Arthur Penn (Mickey One [1964], clearly drawing inspiration from Truffaut's Tirez sur la pianiste and other French New Wave films), John Boorman (Point Blank [1967], similarly caught up, though in the Nouvelle vague's deeper waters), and Alan J. Pakula (Klute [1971]) directed movies that knowingly related themselves to the original film noirs, inviting audiences in on the game. Conscious acknowledgment of the classic era's conventions, as historical archetypes to be revived, rejected, or reimagined, is what puts the "neo" in neo-noir, according to many critics. Though several late classic noirs, Kiss Me Deadly in particular, were entirely self-knowing and post-traditional in conception, none that were top- or midbudgeted (like Aldrich's masterpiece) tipped its hand in a way noticeable to most audiences of the time. The first broadly popular crime drama of an unmistakabe neo-noir nature was not a movie, but the TV series Peter Gunn (1958–61), created by Blake Edwards.

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Neo-noir/Take 1: As car thief Michel Poiccard, aka Laszlo Kovacs, Jean-Paul Belmondo does his best Bogey in À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1960), written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard from a story by François Truffaut.

A manifest affiliation with noir traditions—which, by its nature, allows for different sorts of commentary on them to be inferred—can also provide the basis for explicit critiques of those traditions. The first major film to work this angle (that might be thought of as the most "neo" of "neo") was French director Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless; 1960), which pays its literal respects to Bogart and his crime films while brandishing a bold new style for a new day. In 1973, director Robert Altman, who had worked on Peter Gunn, flipped off noir piety with The Long Goodbye. Based on the novel by Raymond Chandler, it features one of Bogart's most famous characters, but in iconoclastic fashion: Philip Marlowe, the prototypical hardboiled detective, is replayed as a hapless misfit, almost laughably out of touch with contemporary mores and morality. Where Altman's subversion of the film noir mythos was so irreverent as to anger many contemporary critics, around the same time Woody Allen was paying affectionate, at points idolatrous homage to the classic mode with Play It Again, Sam (1972).

The most acclaimed of the neo-noirs of the era was director Roman Polanski's 1974 Chinatown. Written by Robert Towne, it is set in 1930s Los Angeles, an accustomed noir locale nudged back some few years in a way that makes the pivotal loss of innocence in the story even crueler. Where Polanski and Towne raised noir to a black apogee by turning rearward, director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader brought the noir attitude crashing into the present day with Taxi Driver (1976), a cackling, bloody-minded gloss on bicentennial America. In 1978, Walter Hill wrote and directed the The Driver, a chase movie as might have been imagined by Jean-Pierre Melville in an especially abstract mood. Hill was already a central figure in 1970s noir of a more straightforward manner, having written the script for director Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), adapting a novel by pulp master Jim Thompson, as well as for two tough private eye films: an original screenplay for Hickey & Boggs (1972) and an adaptation of a novel by Ross Macdonald, the leading literary descendant of Hammett and Chandler, for The Drowning Pool (1975). Some of the strongest 1970s noirs, in fact, were unwinking remakes of the classics, "neo" mostly be default: Altman's heartbreaking Thieves Like Us (1973), based on the same source as Ray's They Live by Night, and Farewell, My Lovely (1975), the Chandler tale made classically as Murder, My Sweet, remade here with Robert Mitchum in his last notable noir role. Detective series, prevalent on American television during the period, updated the hardboiled tradition in different ways, but the show conjuring the most noir tone was a horror crossover touched with shaggy, Long Goodbye–style humor: Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–75), featuring a Chicago newspaper reporter investigating strange, usually supernatural occurrences.

The 1980s through the present

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Neo-noir/Take 2: Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell, a femme fatale for the 1990s—and the ages—in the smash box-office hit Basic Instinct (1992). She is seen here under interrogation, preparing to open up.

The turn of the decade brought Scorsese's black-and-white Raging Bull (cowritten by Schrader); an acknowledged masterpiece—often voted the greatest film of the 1980s in critics' polls—it is also a retreat, telling a story of a boxer's moral self-destruction that recalls in both theme and visual ambience noir dramas such as Body and Soul (1947) and Champion (1949). From 1981, the popular Body Heat, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, invokes a different set of classic noir elements, this time in a humid, erotically charged Florida setting; its success confirmed the commercial viability of neo-noir, at a time when the major Hollywood studios were becoming increasingly risk averse. The mainstreaming of neo-noir is evident in such films as Black Widow (1987), Shattered (1991), and Final Analysis (1992). Few neo-noirs have made more money or more wittily updated the tradition of the noir double-entendre than Basic Instinct (1992), directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Joe Eszterhas. Over the past twenty-five years, the big-budget auteur to work most frequently in a neo-noir mode has been Michael Mann, with the films Thief (1981), Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004), and the 1980s TV series Miami Vice and Crime Story. Mann's output exemplifies a primary strain of neo-noir, in which classic themes and tropes are revisited in a contemporary setting with an up-to-date visual style and rock- or hip hop–based musical soundtrack. Like Chinatown, its more complex predecessor, Curtis Hanson's Oscar-winning L.A. Confidential (1997), based on the James Ellroy novel, demonstrates an opposite tendency—the deliberately retro film noir; its tale of corrupt cops and femme fatales is seemingly lifted straight from a movie of 1953, the year in which it is set.

Working generally with much smaller budgets, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have created one of the most substantial film oeuvres influenced by classic noir, with movies such as Blood Simple (1984) and Fargo (1996), considered by some a supreme work in the neo-noir mode. The Coens' most recent nod to the noir tradition is The Man Who Wasn't There (2001); a black-and-white crime melodrama set in 1949, it features a scene apparently staged to mirror the one from Out of the Past pictured above. The Coens cross noir with other generic lines in the gangster drama Miller's Crossing (1990)—loosely based on the Dashiell Hammett novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key—and the comedy The Big Lebowski (1998), a tribute to Chandler and an homage to Altman's version of The Long Goodbye.

Perhaps no contemporary films better reflect the classic noir A-movie-with-a-B-movie-soul than those of director-writer Quentin Tarantino; neo-noirs of his such as Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) display a relentlessly self-reflexive, sometimes tongue-in-cheek sensibility, similar to the work of the New Wave directors and the Coens. Other movies from the era readily identifiable as neo-noir (some retro, some more au courant) include director John Dahl's Kill Me Again (1989), Red Rock West (1992), and The Last Seduction (1993); four adaptations of novels by Jim Thompson—The Kill-Off (1989), After Dark, My Sweet (1990), The Grifters (1990), and the remake of The Getaway (1994); and many more, including adaptations of the work of other major noir fiction writers: The Hot Spot (1990), from Hell Hath No Fury, by Charles Williams; Miami Blues (1990), from the novel by Charles Willeford; and Out of Sight (1998), from the novel by Elmore Leonard. On television, the series Moonlighting (1985–89) paid homage to classic noir while demonstrating an unusual appreciation of the sense of humor often found in the original cycle. Between 1983 and 1989, Mickey Spillane's hardboiled private eye Mike Hammer was played with wry gusto by Stacy Keach in a series and several stand-alone TV movies (an unsuccessful revival followed in 1997–98). The British miniseries The Singing Detective (1986), written by Dennis Potter, tells the story of a mystery writer named Philip Marlow; widely considered one of the finest neo-noirs in any medium, some critics cite it as the greatest television production of all time.

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Neo-noir/Take 3: Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick (2005). The movie's characters, most of them high-school students, speak as if they learned English from Hammett and Chandler.

Among the leading Hollywood directors of noir during the current decade has been the British-born Christopher Nolan, with the fantastically twisted Memento (2000), the remake of Insomnia (2002), and Batman Begins (2005), his dark-toned take on the superhero. Harsh Times (2006) is written and directed by David Ayer, also the screenwriter for Training Day (2001) and, adapting a story by hardboiled fiction author James Ellroy, Dark Blue (2002). The latter two update the classic noir bad-cop tale, typified by Shield for Murder (1954) and Rogue Cop (1954). In 2005, Shane Black directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, basing his screenplay in part on a crime novel by Brett Halliday, who published his first stories back in the 1920s. The film plays with an awareness not only of classic noir but also of neo-noir reflexivity itself, making it a model neo²-noir. Director Sean Penn's The Pledge (2001), though adapted from a very self-reflexive novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, plays noir comparatively straight, to devastating effect. The most commercially successful of recent neo-noirs is Sin City (2005), directed by Robert Rodriguez in extravagantly stylized black and white with the odd bit of color. The film is based on a series of comic books created by Frank Miller (credited as the movie's codirector), which are in turn openly indebted to the works of Spillane and other pulp mystery authors. Similarly, graphic novels provide the basis for Road to Perdition (2002), directed by Sam Mendes, and A History of Violence (2005), directed by David Cronenberg; the latter, according to many critics, is the neo-noir of the decade. Writer-director Rian Johnson's Brick (2005), featuring present-day high schoolers speaking a version of 1930s hardboiled argot, won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the Sundance Film Festival. The television series Veronica Mars (2004–7) also brought a youth-oriented twist to film noir.

Psycho-noir

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Perversion in suburbia: Night club chanteuse Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini, sings the title song in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).

The work of David Lynch—particularly Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1996), Mulholland Drive (2001), and the Twin Peaks cycle, both TV series (1990–91) and movie, Fire Walk With Me (1992)—shows the influence of film noir filtered through a uniquely individualistic vision. Featuring delusionary or sociopathic protagonists (or, in the case of Blue Velvet, a scene-devouring antagonist; in the Twin Peaks cycle, bizarro spasms at every turn), Lynch's most characteristic work has come to be grouped with others sharing similarly skewed centers of interest as "psycho-noir." Two of the earliest examples after Blue Velvet are literary adaptations directed by David Cronenberg, Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash (1996).

Director David Fincher followed the noir science fiction of Alien³ (1992) and the immensely successful neo-noir Se7en (1995) with a film that earns much greater regard today than it did on original release, the psycho-noir Fight Club (1999). Nolan's Memento, as well as his debut feature, the British Following (1998), may both be classified as psycho-noir. During the new millennium, Park Chan-wook of South Korea has been the most prominent director to work regularly in a psycho-noir mode—a current of noir that can be traced back through Taxi Driver, through Brainstorm, through White Heat, all the way to Stranger on the Third Floor and further still, to Fritz Lang's original M.

Science fiction noir

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Night and the city: Harrison Ford as detective Rick Deckard in Blade Runner (1982). It may be 2019, but this is the world of noir, so it's still raining in Los Angeles.

In the post-classic era, the most significant trend in noir crossovers has involved science fiction. In Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), Lemmy Caution is the name of the old-school private eye in the city of tomorrow. The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972) centers on another implacable investigator and an amnesiac named Welles. Soylent Green (1973), the first major American example, portrays a dystopian, near-future world via a self-evidently noir detection plot; starring Charlton Heston (the lead in Touch of Evil), it also features classic noir standbys Joseph Cotten, Edward G. Robinson, and Whit Bissell. The movie was directed by Richard Fleischer, who two decades before had directed several strong B noirs, including Armored Car Robbery (1950) and The Narrow Margin (1952).

The cynical and stylish perspective of classic film noir had a formative effect on the cyberpunk genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1980s; the movie most directly influential on cyberpunk was Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, which pays clear and evocative homage to the classic noir mode (Scott would subsequently direct the poignant noir crime melodrama Someone to Watch Over Me [1987]). Scholar Jamaluddin Bin Aziz has observed how "the shadow of Philip Marlowe lingers on" in such other "future noir" films as Twelve Monkeys (1995), Dark City (1998), and Minority Report (2002). The hero is the target of investigation in Gattaca (1997), which fuses film noir motifs with a scenario indebted to Brave New World. The Thirteenth Floor (1999), like Blade Runner, is an explicit homage to classic noir, in this case involving speculations about virtual reality. Science fiction, noir, and animation are brought together in the Japanese films Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), both directed by Mamoru Oshii, and the short A Detective Story (2003), set in the Matrix universe.

Film noir parodies

Film noir has been parodied many times, in many manners. In 1945, Danny Kaye starred in what appears to be the first intentional film noir parody, Wonder Man. That same year, Deanna Durbin was the singing lead in the comedic noir Lady on a Train, which makes fun of Woolrich-brand wistful miserablism. Bob Hope inaugurated the private-eye noir parody with My Favorite Brunette (1947), playing a baby photographer who is mistaken for an ironfisted detective. The Big Steal (1949), directed by Don Siegel, and His Kind of Woman, both of which benefit from the services of a slyly self-aware Robert Mitchum, are clear examples of the classic film noir parodying itself. The "Girl Hunt" ballet in Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (1953) is a ten-minute distillation of—and play on—noir in dance. Carl Reiner's "cut and paste" noir farce, the black-and-white Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), is among the best known of the obviously comedic latter-day parodies. Robert Zemekis's 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit? develops a noir plot set in 1940s L.A. around a host of cartoon characters. The Lady from Sockholm (2005) is an independently made noir spoof with an all sock puppet cast.

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"Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man." Robert De Niro as neo-noir ultra-anti-hero Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976).

Noir parodies come in darker tones as well. Murder by Contract (1958), directed by Irving Lerner, is an eighty-one-minute-long deadpan joke on noir, with a denouement as bleak as any of the movies it kids. An ultra-low-budget Columbia Pictures production, it may qualify as the first intentional example of what is now called a neo-noir film; it certainly seems to have been a source of inspiration for Melville's acclaimed Le Samouraï. Taxi Driver, one of the quintessential 1970s neo-noirs, caustically deconstructs the "dark" crime film, taking it to an absurd extreme and then offering a conclusion that manages to mock every possible anticipated ending—triumphant, tragic, artfully ambivalent—while being each, all at once. Flirting with splatter status even more brazenly, the Coens' Blood Simple is both an exacting pastiche and an outrageous exaggeration of classic noir. Adapted by director Robinson Devor from a novel by Charles Willeford, The Woman Chaser (1999) sends up not just the noir mode but the entire Hollywood filmmaking process, with seemingly each shot staged as the visual equivalent of a Marlowe wisecrack—funny, but it smarts.

In other media, the television series Sledge Hammer! (1986–88) lampoons noir, along with Dirty Harry, capital punishment, and anything else available. Sesame Street (1969–curr.) occasionally casts Kermit the Frog as a private eye; the sketches refer to some of the typical motifs of noir movies, in particular the voiceover. Garrison Keillor's radio program and film A Prairie Home Companion both feature the recurring character Guy Noir, a hardboiled detective whose adventures always wander into farce. Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger has trod the same not-so-mean streets, both on radio and in comedy albums. Cartoons such as Garfield's Babes and Bullets (1989) and comic strip characters such as Tracer Bullet of Calvin and Hobbes have parodied both film noir and the kindred hardboiled tradition—one of the sources from which film noir sprang and which it now overshadows.

Noir—So what is it?

The history of film noir criticism has seen fundamental questions become matters of controversy unusually intense for such a field. Where aesthetic debates tend to concentrate on the quality and meaning of specific artworks and the intentions and influences of their creators, in film noir, the debates are regularly much broader. Four large questions may be identified, two of them addressed at the beginning of this article:

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Still up in the air: Some consider Vertigo (1958) a noir on the basis of plot and tone and various motifs. Others say the combination of color and the specificity of director Alfred Hitchcock's vision exclude it from the category.

• What defines film noir?
• What sort of category is it?

A third question applies at a more specific level, but is sweeping:

• What movies qualify as film noirs?

This article refers to movies from the classic period as "film noir" if there is a critical consensus supporting that designation. That consensus is almost never complete and is in many cases provisional: The Lost Weekend and The Night of the Hunter, for instance, were seldom considered as film noirs a quarter-century ago; today, a growing number of critics refer to Suspicion (1941), directed by Hitchcock, and Casablanca (1942), directed by Curtiz, as film noirs. Outside of the classic period, consensus is much rarer—movies are considered as noir herein if a substantial number of critics have discussed them as such. In order to decide which films are noir (and which are not), many critics refer to a set of elements they see as marking examples of the mode. This leads to a fourth major point of controversy in the field, one that overlaps with all those noted above:

• What are the identifying characteristics of film noirs?

For instance, some critics insist that a film noir, to be authentic, must have a bleak conclusion (e.g., Criss Cross or D.O.A.), but many acknowledged classics of the genre have clearly happy endings (e.g., Stranger on the Third Floor, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and The Dark Corner), while the tone of many other noir denouements is ambivalent, in a variety of ways. The ambition of this section, then, can be no more than modest: it is an attempt to survey those characteristics most often cited by critics as representative of classic film noirs. As diverse as that set of movies is, the diversity of films from outside the classic period that have been discussed as noir is so great that any similar survey would be impractical; however, those classic noir identifying marks often referenced in neo-noirs—however frequently or seldom they actually appeared in the original films—are noted as are certain signal trends of the latter-day mode.²

Characteristics of classic film noir

Visual style

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Forget it, Jake. It's...the blinds. Private eye Jake Gittes, performed by Jack Nicholson, undergoes some old-school shadowcasting in Chinatown (1974).

Film noirs tended to use low-key lighting schemes producing stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterning. The shadows of Venetian blinds or banister rods, cast upon an actor, a wall, or an entire set, are an iconic visual in film noir and had already become a cliché well before the neo-noir era. Characters' faces may be partially or wholly obscured by darkness—a relative rarity in conventional Hollywood moviemaking. While black-and-white cinematography is considered by many to be one of the essential attributes of classic noir, color films such as Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Niagara (1953), Slightly Scarlet, and Vertigo (1958) are regarded as noir by varying numbers of critics.

Film noir is also known for its use of Dutch angles, low-angle shots, and wide-angle lenses. Other devices of disorientation relatively common in film noir include shots of people reflected in one or more mirrors, shots through curved or frosted glass or other distorting objects (such as during the strangulation scene in Strangers on a Train), and special effects sequences of a sometimes bizarre nature. Beginning in the late 1940s, location shooting—often involving night-for-night sequences—became increasingly frequent in noir.

In an analysis of the visual approach of Kiss Me Deadly (1955), a late and self-consciously stylized example of classic noir, critic Alain Silver describes how cinematographic choices emphasize the story's themes and mood. In one scene, the characters, seen through a "confusion of angular shapes," thus appear "caught in a tangible vortex or enclosed in a trap." Silver makes a case for how "[s]ide light is used...to reflect character ambivalence," while shots of characters in which they are lit from below "conform to a convention of visual expression which associates shadows cast upward of the face with the unnatural and ominous."

Structure and narrational devices

Film noirs tend to have unusually convoluted story lines, frequently involving flashbacks, flashforwards, and other techniques that disrupt and sometimes obscure the narrative sequence. Voiceover narration—most characteristically by the protagonist, less frequently by a secondary character or by an unseen, omniscient narrator—is sometimes used as a structuring device. Both flashbacks and voiceover narration are today often used in movies looking to quickly establish their neo-noir bona fides. Bold experiments in cinematic storytelling were sometimes attempted in noir: Lady in the Lake, for example, is shot entirely from the point of view of protagonist Philip Marlowe; the face of star (and director) Robert Montgomery is seen only in mirrors. The Chase (1946) takes oneirism and fatalism as the basis for its fantastical narrative system, redolent of certain horror stories, but with little precedent in the context of a putatively realistic genre. In their different ways, both Sunset Boulevard and D.O.A. are tales told by dead men. Latter-day noir has been in the forefront of structural experimentation in popular cinema, as exemplified by such films as Pulp Fiction and Memento.

Plots, characters, and settings

Crime, usually murder, is an element of almost all film noirs; in addition to standard-issue greed, jealousy is frequently the criminal motivation. A crime investigation—by a private eye, a police detective (sometimes acting alone), or a concerned amateur—is the most prevalent, but far from dominant, basic plot. In other common plots the protagonists are implicated in heists or con games, or in murderous conspiracies often involving adulterous affairs. False suspicions and accusations of crime are frequent plot elements, as are betrayals and double-crosses. Amnesia is far more common in film noir than in real life, and cigarette smoking can seem virtually mandatory.

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Pursued (1947): A Western adopting noir style, or a film noir set in the Wild West?

Film noirs tend to revolve around heroes who are more flawed and morally questionable than the norm, often fall guys of one sort or another. The characteristic heroes of noir are described by many critics as "alienated"; in the words of Silver and Ward, "filled with existential bitterness." Certain archetypal characters appear in many film noirs—hardboiled detectives, femmes fatales, corrupt policemen, jealous husbands, intrepid claims adjusters, and down-and-out writers. As can be observed in many movies of an overtly neo-noir nature, the private eye and the femme fatale are the character types with which film noir has come to be most identified, but only a minority of movies now regarded as classic noir feature either. For example, of the "Thirty-five notable American films noir of the classic period" listed above, in only four does the star play a private eye: The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly. Just five others readily qualify as detective stories: Laura, The Killers, The Stranger, The Big Heat, and Touch of Evil.

Film noir is often associated with an urban setting, and a few cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, in particular—are the location of many of the classic films. In the eyes of many critics, the city is presented in noir as a "labyrinth" or "maze." Bars, lounges, nightclubs, and gambling dens are frequently the scene of action. The climaxes of a substantial number of film noirs take place in visually complex, often industrial settings, such as refineries, factories, trainyards, power plants—most famously the explosive conclusion of White Heat. In the popular (and, frequently enough, critical) imagination, in noir it is always night and it always rains. A substantial trend within latter-day noir—dubbed "film soleil" by critic D. K. Holm—heads in precisely the opposite direction, with tales of deception, seduction, and corruption exploiting bright, sun-baked settings, stereotypically the desert or open water, to caustic effect. Significant predecessors from the classic and early post-classic eras include The Lady from Shanghai; the Robert Ryan vehicle Inferno (1953); the French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, Plein soleil (Purple Noon in the U.S., better rendered elsewhere as Blazing Sun or Full Sun; 1960); and director Don Siegel's version of The Killers (1964). The tendency was at its peak during the late 1980s and 1990s, with films such as Dead Calm (1989); After Dark, My Sweet; The Hot Spot; Delusion (1991); and Red Rock West, and TV's Miami Vice, which premiered in 1984 and turned increasingly mordant over its five-year run.

Worldview, morality, and tone

Film noir is often described as essentially pessimistic. The noir stories that are regarded as most characteristic tell of people trapped in unwanted situations (which, in general, they did not cause but are responsible for exacerbating), striving against random, uncaring fate, and frequently doomed. The movies are seen as depicting a world that is inherently corrupt. Classic film noir has been associated by many critics with the American social landscape of the era—in particular, with a sense of heightened anxiety and alienation that is said to have followed World War II. Nicholas Christopher's opinion is representative: "it is as if the war, and the social eruptions in its aftermath, unleashed demons that had been bottled up in the national psyche." Film noirs, especially those of the 1950s and the height of the Red Scare, are often said to reflect cultural paranoia; Kiss Me Deadly is the noir most frequently marshaled as evidence for this claim.

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"You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go." "A lot depends on who's in the saddle." Bogey. Bacall. The Big Sleep.

Rather than focusing on simple "black and white" decisions, film noirs tend to pose moral quandaries that are unusually ambiguous and relative—at least within the context of Hollywood cinema. Characters that do pursue goals based on clear-cut moral standards may be more than willing to let the "ends justify the means." For example, the investigator hero of The Stranger, obsessed with tracking down a Nazi war criminal, places other people in mortal danger in order to capture his target. Whereas the Production Code obliged almost all classic noirs to see that steadfast virtue was ultimately rewarded and vice, in the absence of shame and redemption, severely punished (however dramatically incredible the final rendering of mandatory justice might be), a substantial number of latter-day noirs flout such conventions; in their very different ways, the conclusions of Chinatown and The Hot Spot provide two clear examples.

The tone of film noir is generally regarded as downbeat; some critics experience it as darker still—"overwhelmingly black," according to Robert Ottoson. Influential critic (and filmmaker) Paul Schrader wrote in a seminal 1972 essay that "film noir is defined by tone," a tone he seems to perceive as "hopeless." In describing the adaptation of Double Indemnity, leading noir analyst Foster Hirsch describes the "requisite hopeless tone" achieved by the filmmakers, which appears to characterize his view of noir as a whole. On the other hand, definitive film noirs such as The Big Sleep, The Lady from Shanghai, and Double Indemnity itself are famed for their hardboiled repartee, often imbued with sexual innuendo and self-reflexive humor—notes of another tone.

Notes

Note 1: There is no completely objective way of establishing the most appropriate length for a list of notable films in a particular field or for deciding on the criteria for inclusion. A list of 20 films from the 1940s and 15 from the 1950s (reflecting the relative number of noirs detected by latter-day critics in each decade) provides comfortingly round numbers and a scope large enough to include (almost) all the classic film noirs claimed to be essential yet small enough not to overwhelm the reader intent on a self-education in noir from the ground up.

The methodology employed to identify "notability"—restated later in the text of the article as "enduring fame"—relies on IMDb.com's Power Search function. With the "first" (Stranger on the Third Floor) and "last" (Touch of Evil) classic noirs guaranteed inclusion into the rosters of 20 and 15, the list of notables is based on the IMDb-identified film noirs most highly rated by that site's users, with a minimum vote count of 2,000 for the 1940s and (reflecting the lower awareness of later noir) 1,000 for the 1950s, and a minimum average "rating" of 7.1 (out of a possible 10).

This rating procedure led to a nearly "perfect" 20 films for the 1940s (with Stranger on the Third Floor making 21) and a "perfect" 15 films (including Touch of Evil) for the 1950s. One exclusion needed to be made from the 1940s, which was easily done. Though identified by IMDb as a film noir, there is not presently a critical consensus that Suspicion (1941), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, qualifies for inclusion in the category. In addition, Hitchcock is already represented four times on the notables list.

In the case of the 1950s, a single substitution was made—the imperative was not exclusion, but inclusion: Night and the City, for reasons described in the article, is treated by almost all film historians as an American film noir; furthermore, it is regarded by almost all critics who have published extensively in the field as one of the finest movies of the type. It passes the 1,000-vote criterion, it has a very high rating of 8.0, and it is fair to say that any critic would be shocked to see it excluded from a list of notable examples of classic noir. The movie dropped in its favor was The Desperate Hours (1955): (a) star Humphrey Bogart is already represented six times on the list; (b) no published critics regard it as a prime example of the form; and (c) the leading encyclopedia in the field, Silver and Ward's, does not conclusively state that it is a noir. In terms of historical notability, based on the critical literature, the most important film missing from the list is probably Murder, My Sweet and the most important missing director is certainly Anthony Mann (covered in the article). Of those films on the present list professional critics would be most likely to sacrifice in favor of Murder, My Sweet, some would forego High Sierra (insufficiently noir in style), others The Lost Weekend (insufficiently noir in plot), still others The Stranger (insufficiently noir in provocation).

Actors are listed as "significant noir performers" according to different criteria for stars and supporting players: The former are listed as significant if they were star-billed in at least three film noirs total or in two films on the notables list (stars of listed films who do not qualify as significant noir performers are named in parentheses). The latter are identified as significant (and thus named) if they appeared in at least five film noirs total—the name of one nonqualifying supporting player is included: Lee Marvin appeared in only two movies now regarded as film noirs of the classic period, but his performance as Vince Stone in The Big Heat is one of the most renowned villainous turns in the chronicles of noir. An accounting of the most important missing star or featured actors would include at least Veronica Lake, Robert Ryan, Richard Conte, Dan Duryea, Alan Ladd, Dick Powell, and heavies William Bendix and Raymond Burr. Character actor Whit Bissell appeared in no fewer than a dozen classic noirs.

Note 2: A fifth fundamental question also prompts little agreement: What is the preferred English plural of "film noir"? There are valid arguments to be made for and against "films noirs" (the spelling in the original French), "films noir" (arguably the most grammatical English), and "film noirs" (the most prevalent usage). Individual writers and publishing concerns are free to select any one of the three styles according to their own preferences. In Wikipedia, however, a group of writer-editors with different and often strongly held opinions on the matter must agree to use a common style. As the matter of controversy comes down to the spelling of a word and the topic of discussion is primarily American, the standard reference authority is the leading dictionary of American English, Merriam-Webster's. The latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary—acknowledging all three aforementioned styles as acceptable—gives as the preferred spelling "film noirs." That is the style used in this article.

Sources

• Aziz, Jamaluddin Bin (2005). "Future Noir," chap. in "Transgressing Women: Investigating Space and the Body in Contemporary Noir Thrillers." Ph. D. dissertation, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University (chapter available online).
• Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton (2002 [1955]). A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, trans. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books. ISBN 0-87286-412-X
• Christopher, Nicholas (1997). Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-684-82803-0
• Dancyger, Ken, and Jeff Rush (2002). Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules. Boston et al.: Focal Press. ISBN 0-240-80477-5
• Greenspun, Roger (1973). "Mike Hodges's 'Pulp' Opens; A Private Eye Parody Is Parody of Itself," New York Times, February 9.
• Hirsch, Foster (2001). The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. New York: Da Capo. ISBN 0-306-81039-5
• McGilligan, Patrick (1997). Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York and London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19375-7
• Naremore, James (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21294-0
• Ottoson, Robert (1981). A Reference Guide to the American Film Noir: 1940–1958. Metuchen, N.J., and London: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-1363-7
• Palmer, R. Barton (2004). "The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The Example of Film Noir," in A Companion To Literature And Film, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (pp. 258–277). Maiden, Mass., Oxford, and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-23053-X
• Schatz, Thomas (1998 [1996]). The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, new ed. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19596-2
• Schrader, Paul (1972). "Notes on Film Noir," Film Comment 8, no. 1 (collected in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader [1]).
• Silver, Alain (1995). "Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style," rev. ver. (collected in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader [1]; available online).
• Silver, Alain, and James Ursini (and Robert Porfirio—vol. 3), eds. (2004 [1996–2004]). Film Noir Reader, vols. 1–4. Pompton Plains, N.J.: Limelight Editions (introductions to vols. 1 and 2 and selected essays available online).
• Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth M. Ward, eds. (1992). Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, 3d ed. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press. ISBN 0-87951-479-5

Further reading

• Biesen, Sheri Chinen (2005). Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-8217-6
• Cameron, Ian, ed. (1993). The Book of Film Noir. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-0589-4
• Chopra-Gant, Mike (2005). Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir. London: IB Tauris. ISBN 1-85043-838-2
• Clarens, Carlos (1980). Crime Movies: An Illustrated History. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-01262-X
• Cochran, David (2000). America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-813-4
• Copjec, Joan, ed. (1993). Shades of Noir. London and New York: Verso. ISBN 0-86091-625-1
• Dimendberg, Edward (2004). Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01314-X
• Durgnat, Raymond (1970). "Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir," Cinema 6/7 (collected in Gorman et al., The Big Book of Noir, and Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader [1]).
• Fisher, Lara (2007). "Noir is my Beat." Morrisville, NC: Lulu ISBN 1-4303-2330-3
• Gorman, Ed, Lee Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. (1998). The Big Book of Noir. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-0574-4
• Hannsberry, Karen Burroughs (1998). Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0429-9
• Hannsberry, Karen Burroughs (2003). Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1484-7
• Holm, D. K. (2005). Film Soleil. Harpenden, UK: Pocket Essentials. ISBN 1-904048-50-1
• Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. (1998). Women in Film Noir, new ed. London: British Film Institute. ISBN 0-85170-666-5
• Keaney, Michael F. (2003). Film Noir Guide: 745 Films of the Classic Era, 1940–1959. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-1547-9
• Lyons, Arthur (2000). Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir. New York: Da Capo. ISBN 0-306-80996-6
• Mason, Fran (2002). American Gangster Cinema: From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave. ISBN 0-333-67452-9
• McArthur, Colin (1972). Underworld U.S.A. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-01953-4
• Muller, Eddie (1998). Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York: St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-18076-4
• Neale, Steve (2000). Genre and Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-02606-7
• Palmer, R. Barton (1994). Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir. New York: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-9335-6
• Palmer, R. Barton, ed. (1996). Perspectives on Film Noir. New York: G.K. Hall. ISBN 0-8161-1601-6
• Rabinowitz, Paula (2002). Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-11481-8
• Schatz, Thomas (1997). Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN 0-684-19151-2
• Selby, Spencer (1984). Dark City: The Film Noir. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-89950-103-6
• Shadoian, Jack (2003). Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, 2d ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514291-8
• Silver, Alain, and James Ursini (1999). The Noir Style. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press. ISBN 0-87951-722-0
• Spicer, Andrew (2002). Film Noir. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. ISBN 0-582-43712-1
• Telotte, J. P. (1989). Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06056-3
• Tuska, Jon (1984). Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective. Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23045-5

External links

• All-Time 100 Movies Time magazine's noir-heavy list includes a single TV production, The Singing Detective, among its 100 picks
• Classic Noir Online comprehensive survey of over 700 noir titles, with links to actors and directors
• Film Noir leading individual fansite; part of Tim Dirks's Filmsite.org
• Film Noir Q&A-style essay by leading noir critic-historian Eddie Muller; part of the GreenCine website
• Film Noir: A Bibliography of Materials holdings of the UC Berkeley Library
• Film Noir Alley individual fansite devoted to classic noir of the 1940s and 1950s
• Film Noir: An Introduction essay with links to discussions of ten important noirs; part of Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture
• Film Noir Foundation educational resource addressing the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of film noir
• Le Film Policier Noir extensive discussion (in English) of French noir by Yuri German; part of the Hard-Boiled Mysteries website
• A Guide to Film Noir Genre ten deadeye bullet points from Roger Ebert
• An Introduction to Neo-Noir essay by Lee Horsley
• The Noir Thriller: Introduction excerpt from 2001 book by Lee Horsley
• No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir and Other Essays writings by John Blaser, with noir-related media
• Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir podcast close readings of many classic noirs by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards

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