The images are iconic, and uniquely American: The pulled-down hat brim, the rumpled trench coat, the cigarette dangling from the corner of a lip; the feline creature in the tight dress, deadlier than the male; gigantic shadows on the brick wall of an alley, a piece of the city that has broken loose and lodged in a place of eternal night.
Like most native culture, this cinematic sub-genre (commonly bracketed between 1945 and 1958, although there are notable exceptions as far back as 1931 and as recent as 1967) came about through several influences: in this case, post-war disillusionment, the erosion of faith in governments and institutions, and men’s concerns about women’s independence earned during wartime employment in the defense industry. The final touch came from Jewish and dissident filmmakers in flight from the Holocaust, bringing with them the expressionistic camera angles, Cubist sets, and themes outlawed as “decadent” by Nazi Germany. Ironically, the U.S. studios’ strict censorship code, which prohibited overt violence, sexual situations, and sins unpunished, led to a subtlety of symbols and expression that still resonates today. Like the steam-engine, this was a development whose time had come. All it needed was a name.
That came from French critics who, when the embargo on U.S. films was lifted after the Liberation, saw the films back-to-back, observed the consistency of theme, and cried, film noir!;* literally, “black film.” It was raw, it was unapologetic, and it told the truth: In the words of the narrator of Detour (1945), “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.”
Twenty-first-century audiences, accustomed to the frantic pace of superhero, sci-fi, and other hypermodern productions adapted from graphic novels (comic books, to an earlier generation) may lose patience with the oblique motives and slow buildup of suspense to be found in classic noir, but a steady diet—excluding any movie whose special-effects credits run almost into the next showing—should convert all but the hopeless. These films were made for grown-ups, assuming intelligence on the part of their viewers, and an attention span longer than a high-five.
The effect of noir can’t be described in words, only images: A man pushed out a high window, falling away from the camera; the orgasmic leer on a psychopath’s face in the act of murder; the gold anklet worn by a scheming woman descending a staircase; a child-killer pleading for mercy on his knees before a jury of ordinary cutthroats; a cynical detective falling in love with the portrait of the woman whose murder he’s investigating. These are not images you watch; you breathe them in like gas—odorless, colorless, inescapable, and lethal.
Then come back for another whiff.