Bright Lights, Dark City:

In the period immediately surrounding the United States' entry into the Second World War, an entirely new genre in American cinema began to percolate; a bold celluloid manifestation of the nation's sublimated cynicism and paranoia. This new style - and a "style" it was, much more so than a discrete movement or tradition - would become perhaps the most quintessentially American filmmaking genre outside of the Western. It was film noir, of course, and if it took a group of French critics to coin the name, then the films' own latent eroticism, casual brutality, and bleak moral ambivalence was nevertheless formulated specifically to address the concerns of the American people at the cusp of WWII and then the Cold War. It was just what we needed to work out the tensions of the moment: a complex little series of morality plays where the heroes and villains were only variations on our own fractured selves, and the gritty milieux - rain-spattered alleyways, seductive temptresses, wreaths of cigarette smoke - were like windows into our subconscious fears and desires, mapped out in harsh and hypnotic black and white.

Timeliness aside, of course, noir didn't emerge from a vacuum. Its stylistic elements were many and disparate, referencing an extremely wide range of influences from pre-sound film to modern literature. The dramatic low-key lighting which was its most recognizable visual attribute stemmed from the German Expressionist cinema of filmmakers like Fritz Lang, whose 1931 film M and, to a lesser extent, his Dr. Mabuse series, were a major influence on the genre (Lang would later relocate to Hollywood to produce a handful of films noir himself). Its thematic elements were adopted more or less wholesale from the contemporary genre of hardboiled detective fiction, many of whose primary craftsmen (Raymond Chandler chief amongst them) would contribute and even adapt their own stories for noir movie adaptation. Also not to be ignored were the advances on the home front: the revolutionary strides forward for lighting and deep-focus photography by Orson Welles (himself a noir director, with 1947's The Lady from Shanghai) and cinematographer Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane (1941) left an unmistakable imprint on classic noir. Add to this stew of influences two very different, roughly contemporary European "realism" movements - the dark, pessimistic French Poetic Realism of Renoir and Carne, and the Italian Neorealism exhibited by directors like De Sica and Visconti - as well as a handful of previously established Hollywood genres, from the gangster pictures of the 1930s to the "social problem film" as represented by I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang in 1932, and the portrait is more or less complete.

Far more important than the origins of noir's stylistic elements, however, are the ways in which they found themselves arranged in the films: it's here, with the combination of these elements, that film noir's most crucial conventions and iconography are established. A typical noir will feature crime (usually violent in nature), dark urban settings, protagonists of dubious character, and dangerous women. The majority of these genre signifiers, however, are just as easily interchangeable; both Anthony Mann's Boder Incident (1949) and John Farrow's His Kind of Woman (1951) take place in the sun-drenched desert vistas of Mexico, for instance, while the stereotypical private eye and femme fatale tropes, while undoubtedly the most culturally ubiquitous symbols for the noir aesthetic, are nowhere near necessary prerequisites. The important thing in noir, to the exclusion of everything else, is the mood: whether telling the story of an intrepid detective in Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) or of an alcoholic writer's descent into madness in Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945), noir stories are bleak, biting and socially transgressive. They often depict a world in which traditional values, such as faith in authority and a polarization of good and evil, are turned upside down; and so they represent the dark underside of the American dream, the marginal characters and actions we'd rather leave undiscussed. Film noir is precisely what the name suggests: a cinema of darkness.


Perhaps it's the resonances of this darkness that make noir such a popular and instantly relatable genre, even to this day. Certainly it's no coincidence that around the time the tendency came about, the 20th century was experiencing its most dramatic examples yet of the potential for darkness in mankind, from the rise of fascism to the development of the atomic bomb. The earliest films to be called "noir," including Lang's M, date back to the time and place of Hitler's ascent to power. The context of those films more commonly pinpointed as the roots of the genre - namely The Maltese Falcon in '41 and, from the preceding year, Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor - aren't quite as dramatic, but their position near the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II can't be called entirely coincidental. For a while, film noir was the ideal medium to vent the fears and obsessions of a world beset with dangers. And it struck a nerve. By 1944, when the release and subsequent Oscar nominations of Wilder's Double Indemnity brought noir to the attention of major studios, the stage was set for a miniature revolution in Hollywood filmmaking. The public ate this stuff up with a spoon, and the producers were only too happy to keep dishing it out.

This golden era didn't last long, however. When noir was in its infancy, and its main outlet of distribution was the B-movie industry of Poverty Row independent production houses and low-budget "quota quickies" by studios looking to fill out a double bill, it was able to proceed on its seedy path in relative seclusion from outside forces, producing films which danced around the Hollywood Production Code without ever quite crossing the line. But as the genre grew in mainstream visibility and the House Un-American Activities Committee began to intensify its search for potential subversives in the entertainment industry at the beginning of the Cold War, noir was unsurprisingly one of the genres hit hardest by the powers that be. A significant amount of filmmakers involved with noir ended up blacklisted during the HUAC hearings of 1947, including Hollywood Ten member Dalton Trumbo, who wrote one of the later (and better) B-noirs, Gun Crazy (1949), credited as "Millard Kaufman."

It's almost certain that this intensified and unwelcome focus on noir in the late 1940s was what led to its inevitable decline, as the noir films of the 1950s grew (as a whole) less potent and more in step with the "safer" conventions of classical Hollywood. By 1958, when Welles' Touch of Evil essentially closed the book on film noir in its original incarnation, the genre had run its course. These twilight days were far from creatively bereft, however: they included classic films which expanded on the noir tradition, such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) and even a rare color noir, the dark Marilyn Monroe vehicle Niagara (1953).


And just because the "classic noir" period had ended didn't meant that its influence was over, as well. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the French New Wave school - who, as critics themselves, had undoubtedly read the original French discourses on the subject in 1946 - pay tribute to the genre in a postmodern sense, inserting constant homages to noir iconography, if not always overt ones to its style, in films like Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player and Godard's Breathless (both 1960). The 1970s saw something of a revival in film noir, beginning with Roman Polanski's classic Chinatown (1974) and taking in such clearly noir-inspired films (albeit set in the modern day) as Paul Schrader's Taxi Driver (1976).

Even today, put in its correct context a good noir tribute will capture its audience, 60 years' distance from the source material notwithstanding. What else are Quentin Tarantino's films (particularly Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown) if not hyperkinetic, hyperviolent riffs on the images of noir which have become embedded in the pop culture consciousness? Another, more recent film in this vein was Robert Rodriguez's Sin City (2005), which adapted Frank Miller's clearly noir-informed series of graphic novels and exaggerated their unrelenting violence and dark, stunning visuals to an almost cartoonish (but wickedly fun) level. Indeed, it seems that these days the comic book world has the biggest monopoly on "film" noir, fitting for its origins in dime store hardboiled literature; another 2005 graphic novel adaptation, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, brought a very noir story to small-town America, and let's not forget the vision of Batman as noir antihero in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, an idea that's no stranger to the comics but has never been so satisfactorily illustrated on screen.


But enough history. The point is, noir is one of the genres in American cinema, as relevant and entertaining now as it was in the 1940s and '50s. Maybe it's because we can look at these stories of corruption and redemption and see in their reflective mirrors our own troubled times; or maybe it's simply because the themes inherent in these films transcend such considerations as place and era. In any case, film noir is still very much alive, and if you haven't investigated it yet, now is as good a time as any. This issue the Modern Pea Pod has rounded up a few of the notable noirs which have seen recent release on DVD: the five latter-period films collected on Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 3, as well as the grandaddy of them all, the recently reissued Double Indemnity. Feel free to use these films as a starting point, but do yourself a favor and don't stop there. Watch The Asphalt Jungle, The Big Sleep, Gilda, Laura, Notorious, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and the whole host of other films noir which are out there, waiting to be discovered. You might not like every one of them - hell, is there any genre out there which pleases everybody every time? - but give them a chance and you might just have a few new favorite movies. We know we do.