Film Noir, a term coined by French critics (“black film”) was a cinematic phenomenon that arose in the mid-1940s and survived through most of the 1950s. A new hybrid species of Hollywood film, it could encompass elements of the gangster, police procedural or even melodrama genres, but was distinguished by its mood and style. The “noir” of this sprawling mode was in it’s use of low-key lighting to set a tone of moral darkness or ambiguity-a nocturnal world of ambitious chumps, deadly dames, and an underworld population that was the mirror opposite of the bright, comforting and romantic stories that had characterized the Hollywood studio system.
Drawing often from the pulp fiction of Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler and crime novels of James M. Cain, and set in the post-war era of returning vets, a country victorious but disillusioned about its own domestic righteousness, the films told tales of crime, betrayal and frankly, lust that were made palatable and even artistically compelling by the restraint imposed by the Hollywood Production Code. Thus the noir world is one of shadows symbolizing the dark corners men and women find themselves in when drawn by their own desires, ambitions and flaws.
Film theorists love to analyze film noir and fight battles over what it all says about America, capitalism, Cold War paranoia and just what films fit in the canon, but the best book I’ve read on the subject is Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, by Eddie Muller. Muller, a journalist, noted mystery writer and grand master of all things noir, writes comprehensively on a vast number of titles organized topically in geographic analogies to his titular Dark City (Vixenville, Shamus Flats, Thieves Highway, etc.) giving plot descriptions (which I had to skip through at times to avoid spoilers) and often providing profiles of the great actors who contributed to the genre and whose lives sometimes strangely paralleled those of the Dark City’s denizens.
I plan to look for titles I discovered in the book to add to my Netflix list–there’s something alluring about film noir–it doesn’t plunge you into the dirt and grime of contemporary wannabe crime film junkies such as Tarantino–you can enjoy these little urban tragedies for their beauty, style and cautionary strains that remind us of the wages of sin without feeling the need for a bath afterwards.
