Noir in a Nutshell

Film noir is primarily a vision style in cinema. It hosts its distinctive sounds - traditionally in a plaintive, urban-bluesy soundtrack - but it is the look of  film noir that most effectively defines it. The rain pouring and slicking the night-time city streets as its surface reflects the feeble light of the street lamp and the flash of the neon signs of the sleazy hotels, all-night eateries and dubious taverns. Through the rain and dimly diffused light, nothing is seen clearly. Perspectives are completely distorted and the surfaces of the buildings that surround, all conspire in an angular composition, giving the impression of a claustrophobic trap. The slabs of shadow heighten its sinister atmosphere. The landscapes are fraught with impending danger, filled of corruption, where moral and spiritual values are as ill-defined and murky as the streets.

These images distilled from American features of the 1940s made their impact most forcibly on French film-goers and critics in the latter half of the decade. Throughout the Occupation, American films would be banned in France, but in 1945 a wave of Hollywood films hit French silver screens. Lacking a term of description, French movie critics loaned one from literature. The French editions of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were published by Gallimard under the label serie noire (black series). This prompted the term roman noir to be applied to hard-boiled pulp novels in general and the use of the epithet noir with film was merely the next step.

The obligatory bad boy and  his beretta - from 1948's Act of Violence (the only and one Robert Ryan)

It was, however more than a coincidence that an aspect of American cinema should have appealed to the French palate. The mood of these films not only matched the oft despairing view of the world offered by French existentialists like Albert Camus and Sartre - but they also recalled the romantic despair that characterized French cinema of the pre-war years.

Court in the crossfire - one of noir's first appearances in 1940's Stranger on the Third Floor 

In post-war America, the contrast between the dark distortion of film noir and the frivolous, buoyant Technicolor musicals of the late Forties reflected the fluctuating moods of a society rocked by a world war and stunned by the awesome potential of its new acquisition - the atomic bomb.

A rare color excursion for the genre - from 1956's Bigger Than Life (pictured above James Mason and Christopher Olsen).

Sociologists have implied that film noir may be read as a metaphor of 'the American nightmare' or the underside of the American dream of white picket fences. To illustrate the theory, various social changes may be invoked, the disillusionment with pre-war values brought about by the direct experience of war; the explosion of accepted sexual and economic roles as soldiers returned to confront a measure of female emancipation; and the realization that the peace and security so recently acquired was riddled with uncertainty and political paranoia.

The end of a noir era - Touch of Evil (1958)

One of the earliest examples of  film noir proper, however dates from the year before America entered the war. Stranger on the Third Floor, which was directed by Boris Ingster in 1940, recounts a homicide in a New York boarding house committed by a stranger whom only the hero of the story (Michael) can identify. When Michael himself is falsely accused of the crime - it is left to his lover to track down this stranger, played by a menacing Peter Lorre, a performance which hearkens back to Fritz Lang's M (1931). When his identity is at last revealed, he is pursued through the streets until he is hit by a street-cleaning truck and makes his confession as he lay dying in the gutter.

100% Cotten (from The Third Man)

All the key ingredients of noir are present in this long forgotten B-entry, primarily the atmosphere of unease and paranoia that looms over the film's protagonists. For the following fifteen years, the noir style was cultivated and though it was most commonly seen in crime thrillers, it was also to manifest itself in other genres - melodramas, Westerns, horror movies and some select musicals. Although a rare case or two can be made for certain color films, as Lang's 1952 Rancho Notorious to be classified as film noir, the noir style is strictly confined to black-and-white films and remained so until the end of its era in  the year 1958 with Orson Welles' Touch of Evil giving it it's big send-off.