1941 – 1958

CLASSIC NOIR

EVERETT

Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity.

A Genre Is Born

How German film and pulp fiction inspired a uniquely American art form

© RKO RADIO PICTURES, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

The dramatic lighting and dynamic compositions in Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane, cast a long shadow (literally) on the burgeoning genre of film noir.

The film genre that the French would eventually dub noir (meaning “black”) was created when the visual tropes of German expressionism (think the stark, angular chiaroscuro and Teutonic angst reflected in such silent classics as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) were combined with the influence of the pulp and hard-boiled crime fiction that had been popularized in large part by an American magazine called Black Mask. Influenced by the terse realism of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, the stories limned a seamy world of fedoras, cheap booze, cheaper bars, guns and gumshoes, double-crossing dames, cynicism, doomed boxers, doomed dreamers, doomed gamblers, and doom itself. Often evocative but mostly pedestrian, the pulp tradition nevertheless spawned three authentic geniuses: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain.

A former operative for the Pinkerton detective agency, Hammett “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley,” according to Chandler. Hammett’s prototypical character, the Continental Op, was most famously featured in his first novel, 1929’s Red Harvest. That same year, the writer introduced his detective Sam Spade, the antihero protagonist of The Maltese Falcon, the cinematic adaptation of which has been called the first noir film.

Of the three writers, Chandler chiefly established the world-weary, cynical voice of the private eye (in his case, Philip Marlowe) that would define so much detective fiction—as well as movie voice-overs. Chandler was also arguably the most poetic stylist of the three, with his masterful use of simile and metaphor. (The director Billy Wilder was particularly fond of this description of an old man: “Out of his ears grew hair long enough to catch a moth.”) Chandler’s style and unique ear for dialogue were partly why Wilder hired him to co-write the script for 1944’s Double Indemnity, the film that established noir as a major influence on countless future films.

The man who wrote the book that Double Indemnity was based on was James M. Cain, who also penned The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce, both of which inspired classic films noirs. Unlike Chandler and Hammett, Cain didn’t write from the point of view of a detective. “You can’t end a story with the cops getting the killer,” Cain once said. “I don’t think the law is a very interesting nemesis. I write love stories.”

In the end, noir is, in the words of critic Roger Ebert, “the most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear, and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.”

MARY EVANS/RONALD GRANT/EVERETT

The vampire Nosferatu in F.W. Murnau’s German expressionist classic of the same name. The stark, shadowy imagery of expressionism was an influence on Hollywood noir. (Note the similarity to this image from The Night of the Hunter.)