Dames, Coppers, and Crooks: A Look At Film noir is a style of black and white American films that first evolved in the 1940 s, became prominent in the post-war era, and lasted in a classic “Golden Age” period until about 1960. Frank Nino, a French film critic, first coined the label film noir, which literally means black film or cinema, in 1946. Nino noticed the trend of how “dark” and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France following World War II. In fact, only French critics used the term film noir in their work until the era of noir was over. The French label did not become widely known until the 1970 s. The term film noir is now a more familiar term and it is used more often.
There are many historical factors that influenced the creation of film noir. During the 1930 s, American was struggling with the Great Depression. There was widespread unemployment. The country also led an isolationist political belief, had beliefs of lasting world peace and pledged neutrality.
They also had a very small standing army. America had all of these beliefs as they entered World War II. The United States emerged as the one great victor of the war. The war had devastated Europe and shattered Asia. America, however, had not had any major warfare on its own territory, and during the war it had managed to leap out of the depression and reach almost full employment for it’s inhabitants. America also had the world’s largest military force and the world’s most threatening weapon.
The country now had interests and responsibilities all over the world, but especially in Europe. As the Americans emerged from the war, they were elated and proud, happy of their victory and proud of their military and industrial might. The 1940 s and 50 s were an era of economic boom, partly upheld by military demands during and after WWII, and partly by the Americans new consumer demands. Most people wanted newer and better things, which they now could also afford. It was at this time that the G. I.
Bill of Rights was created. This bill was a veteran funding system that led to an increase in both college education and the founding of the suburban homes of the 50 s. This was a kind of social revolution with consequences like democratization of the education system and the mere fact that more people became higher educated. Advertising was also a phenomenon that came to show its full potential during the postwar years. Then along came the baby boom, a high increase in marriages, and a high increase in new house owners. Another phenomenon was the explosion of suburban communities.
This created a need for building new houses and a demand for cars and highways. Many people moved to the suburbs because they had a longing for more spacious homes, greater security, and better education for their children. Some people also moved to the suburbs for racial issues, because the suburbs were mainly segregated. The suburban life encouraged uniformity. All the surroundings were similar and there was a need for a sense of belonging. The conformity of suburban lives gave way to a drastic increase in memberships in social institutions.
The religious participation was especially renewed. Religion was set in bloom partly because of the Cold War where communists were seen as anti-God. Therefore, religion became an expression for patriotism. In corporate life, big businesses grew bigger, and this had an effect on the workingman.
He went from a hard-working individual to being a person within a cooperation and achievement. The women were led back to the roles they played before the war. Campaigns were led to lead the women back to the kitchen. They were considered obliged to leave their jobs in the workforce so that the veterans could get “their jobs” back.
The most honorable thing women could do was to be fostering a family at home. The new situation in which America was placed did not always give people a feeling of ease. In postwar America, a paranoid feeling developed. As mentioned earlier, the America’s view of communists was not very pleasant. Presumably, they felt their new interests threatened and as a guardian of democracy there developed what Churchill called “the iron curtain” between east and west.
With McCarthy, this Red Scare developed to a countrywide plague. This, of course, could as easily have resulted in a feeling of suspicion and anxiety. The two biggest consequences of WWII were that the American people were given insight in the cruel capabilities of humans, for example, concentration camps, and were given the knowledge of the annihilation powers of their new weapon, the nuclear warhead, at the same time. All of the above contributed to giving some of the Americans a feeling of unease.
This is mostly expressed in arts of work of the time, often as a feeling of alienation and disillusionment. This feeling can also be seen in film noir. Film noir balanced the optimism of Hollywood’s musicals and comedies during this same time period. Fear, mistrust, bleakness and paranoia are readily evident in noir, reflecting the “chilly” Cold War period when the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present.
The criminal, violent, misogynistic or greedy perspectives of anti-heroes in film noir were a metaphor for society’s evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict. Film noirs were also inspired by literature and previous film history. In America in the thirties, there was a literary tradition called hard-boiled novels. The American hard-boiled fictions represented a completely different world and different kind of detective than those found in English and earlier detective stories. Both content and style were differentiated. This kind of fiction added a new tradition of realism to the detective fiction.
The primary moods of classic film noir were melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt, desperation, and paranoia. Heroes or anti-heroes, corrupt characters and villains included down-and-out, conflicted hard-boiled detectives or private eyes, cops, gangsters, government agents, socio-paths, crooks, war veterans, petty criminals, and murderers. Instead of upper-class detectives, we are now introduced to the tough guy detective that is walking the mean streets, and often finds himself on the edge of law and crime. Other protagonists were often morally ambiguous low lives from the dark and gloomy underworld of violent crime and corruption.
Distinctively, they were cynical, tarnished, obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding, menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure loners, struggling to survive. When the protagonist is indeed a detective or private eye they are usually anti-social loners. The environments they live and work in are dark and scary metropolises, often red-light districts, or otherwise dehumanizing environments, like large desolate office buildings. The tough guy is often marked by an excellent gift of verbal wit, even if they are not always given the strongest intellect. Their worlds are dominated by crime, corruption, and cruelty. The men cannot show much emotion in order to upheaval their masculinity, and they have to work alone and be successful in what they do.
They have to seek meaning in activity, not in contemplation, which is also regarded as a female virtue. The existence led by men in film noir is one of toil and loneliness. Because of the way women are defined in these films, life as a married man would doom him to a domestic life, with a domestic woman. For the film noir, men and women are all the same: they are nobody. The females in film noir were either of two types – dutiful, reliable, trustworthy, and loving women; of femme fatale’s – mysterious, double-crossing, gorgeous, unloving, predatory, tough-sweet, unreliable, irresponsible, manipulative, and desperate women.
Femme fatale’s are not given only sexual powers, but also ambitions. They are longing or looking for independence, often economic, and freedom, often from relationships with men. These women that are masters and possessors of their own sexuality represent a danger to the males. She is, because of her ambitions and independence, a threat to the patriarchal system.
The femme fatale is a promiscuous, exciting, intelligent and narcissistic. While her opposite is the boring, but stable wife and mother, who is capable of total devotion to the male, something that the sexual woman is not. The sexual woman’s power and strength are visually expressed in the films, both through the iconography if the image, and through the visual style. It is often the woman that dominates and controls the camera, both because of her own strength and because of the male hero’s attraction to her. She is also usually dressed very feminine and provocative.
These women also usually smoke cigarettes and carry a gun. The only way to control them is to destroy them, something that happens in most noirs. The representation ofthe family institution in movies contributes to legitimize the value of the family institution as a social unit, the ruler role of the man, the domestic role of the woman, and the total dependence of children. In film noir, the family relations are not normal. If a family, or more likely family relations, is represented they are often broken up, filled with mutual hatred or in other ways perverted. Marriages in film noir are often described as boring and sterile or nonsexual.
Because of this twisted family life, both men and women seek satisfaction outside their marriage. The violation of the marriages and traditional family values often results in destruction for the violators. In this manner both pleasure and death await outside the family institution. Film noir was marked by low-key lighting, which causes the effect of obscuring the action, and the star so that the composition becomes more important than the actor.
The use of night and shadows emphasizes the cold and the darkness in the noirs. The change of focus from the actors and movement in the image to the compositor y excitement underlines a fatalistic and hopeless mood. This mood is also fortified through a complex narration, often disjointed and fragmented. To do this, flashbacks are often used, which emphasizes the feeling of lost time and despair. In the narration, voice-over is also often used, and in connection we sometimes get to see the end of the film in its beginning. This is also an unconventional use of the time notion that calls forth a feeling of predestination and irrevocable past.
The wide-angle cinematography participated in making the space distorted and the audience disoriented. In film noir, we also find a repeated use of an image composition where the lines no longer are horizontal, but vertical and sloping. We also find an extended use of extreme low and high-angle perspectives. Setting were often interiors with low-key lighting, Venetian-blinded windows and rooms, and dark, claustrophobic, gloomy appearances. Exteriors were often urban night scenes with deep shadows, wet asphalt, dark alleyways, rain-slicked or mean streets, and flashing neon lights.
Story locations were often in murky and dark streets, dimly lit apartments and hotel rooms of big cities, or abandoned warehouses. All of these stylistic elements served to disorient the spectators and create a mood of uneasiness, alienation, and loneliness in the movies. The dark and uneasy visual expression of the film noirs emphasizes the themes. Some of the most prominent directors of film noir included Orson Welles, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Howard Hawks.
Titles of many film noir often reflect the nature or tone of the style and content itself: Dark Passage (1947), The Naked City (1948), Fear in the Night (1947), Out of the Past (1947), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), etc. Many critics have claimed that director Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) was the first full-featured film noir. It starred Peter Lorre as the sinister “stranger” in a story about the nightmarish after-effects of circumstantial testimony. Others claim Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941) was also an early film noir. The first detective film to use the shadowy, nihilistic noir style in a definitive way was the pivotal work novice director John Huston in the mystery classic The Maltese Falcon (1941), from a 1929 book by Dashiell Hammett. It was famous for Humphrey Bogart’s cool, laconic private eye hero Sam Spade in pursuit of crooks greedy for a jewel-encrusted statue, and Bogart’s foil, Mary Astor as the deceptive femme fatale.
The acting duo of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake was first teamed up in the early noir thriller This Gun For Hire (1942). From the novel A Gun For Sale by British novelist Graham Greene, the moody noir featured Ladd in a star-making role as a ruthless, cat-loving, vengeful San Francisco professional hit-man named Raven working for Nazi fifth columnists, and popular wartime pinup star Lake as nightclub showgirl Ellen Graham, his hostage. Another Dashiell Hammett book of political corruption and murder was adapted for Stuart Heisler’s The Glass Key (1942) for Paramount Studios, again with the duo of Ladd and Lake, and noted as one of the best Hammett adaptations. Ladd starred as Ed Beaumont, a right-hand man and political aide attempting to save his employer from a murder frame-up, while Lake played the seductive fianc ” ee of the boss. The film was noted for the vicious beating given to Ladd by a crime lord thug.
The popular noir couple were brought together again in George Marshall’s post-war crime thriller The Blue Dahlia (1946), with an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Raymond Chandler, the only work he ever wrote directly for the screen. Alan Ladd portrayed returning war veteran Johnny Morrison who discovered that his wife Helen was unfaithful during his absence. When she turned up dead and he became the prime suspect, he was aided in the case by the mysterious Joyce Haywood, played by Lake, the seductive ex-wife of his wife’s lover. Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep was also adapted to the screen. In 1946, Humphrey Bogart, teamed with Lauren Bacall, played the role of private detective Philip Marlowe in the confusing, classic Howard Hawks version of this film. In 1978, Robert Mitchum played Marlowe, with Candy Clark and Sarah Miles as the two Stern wood daughters, and Oliver Reed as corrupt gangster Eddie Mars.
Orson Welles’ films have significant noir features, such as in his expressionistic Citizen Kane (1941), and the complex The Lady From Shanghai (1948), with a love triangle between Welles, a manipulative Rita Hayworth – the blonde-haired femme fatale, and her husband. His Mexican border-town B-movie classic Touch of Evil (1958) starred Charlton Heston as Vargas, a na ” ive Mexican-American narcotics cop, Janet Leigh as his imperiled, honeymooning wife Susan, and Welles’ own corrupt and corpulent local cop Hank Quinlan. The film also featured a comeback appearance by cigar-smoking bordello madam Marlene Dietrich, and a breathtaking opening credits sequence filmed in a single take. This film is considered the last film in the classic cycle of film noirs. Oftentimes, noir could also branch out into thrillers (Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) ), horror, westerns (The Gunfighter (1950) ), science-fiction (Kiss Me Deadly (1955) ) and even film-noir tribute parodies or comedies (Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) ). So-called post-noirs, such as tech-noirs or cyberpunk, and neo-noirs, appeared after the classic period with a revival of the themes of classic noir, although they portrayed contemporary times and often were filmed in color.
Three well-recognized neo-noirs include Chinatown (1974), Body Heat (1981), and L. A. Confidential (1997). Tech-noir, also known as cyberpunk, refers to a hybrid of high-tech sci-fi and film noir portraying a decayed, grungy, unpromising, and dark future.
“Cyberpunk” was first popularized by William Gibson’s book Neuromancer, and best exemplified in the late 1970 s-90 s with the following films: Alien (1979), Outland (1981), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), with Harrison Ford as a futuristic LA replica nt-killer, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), set on Millennium New Years Eve, New Zealand screenwriter Andrew Niccol’s directorial debut film Gattaca (1997) about futuristic genetic engineering, Alex Proyas’ visually stylistic sci-fi Dark City (1998), and David Cronenberg’s twisting existent (1999). There are some critics that view film noir as a genre. If film noir is referred to as a genre, there are a number of problems that arise. First genres tend to cross periods instead of being bound by them and the film noir is generally very closely connected with the 1940 s Hollywood. This particular criticism of noir as a genre relies upon whether one regards the more recent films as a continuation of the noir tradition or not. Furthermore, film noir tends to cross traditional genre boundaries.
There are noir westerns, gangster films and comedies to mention some. Other critics avoid these problems by viewing film noir not as a genre, but by emphasizing the stylistic elements. Here, tone and mood are given considerable weight. Maybe it would be best to simply state that all of the above describe some aspects of what one can call the film noir phenomenon.
Works Consulted The Development of Post-war Literary and Cinematic Noir. 29 Jan 2005 web Tim. Film Noir. 29 Jan 2005 web Lise. Does Film Noir mirror the culture of contemporary America? . 6 Mar 2003.
29 Jan 2005 web Lee. Thriller (Noir), 1930-. 20 Oct 2001. The Literary Encyclopedia.
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