What is ' Film Noir'?

What is 'Noir'?

Excerpt from the book 'Film Noir' by Alain Silver and James Ursini

How did a cycle of the American cinema become one of the most influential movements in film history? During its classic period, which lasted from 1941 to 1958, noir films were derided by critics of the time. Lloyd Shearer, for example, writing a Sunday supplement piece for The New York Times (‘Crime Certainly Does Pay,` 5 August 1945) mocked the trends in ‘crime films` that were ‘homicidal,` ‘lusty` and filled with ‘gut-and-gore crime.` In fact the top echelon of the major studios – Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, MGM and Warner Bros. – usually relegated their ‘crime films` to B-units and released them on the bottom half of double bills. The other majors – RKO, Universal, United Artists and Columbia – along with poverty-row companies like Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), pumped them out shamelessly. There were, of course, prestigious exceptions, Academy Award nominees like The Maltese Falcon (1941, Warner Bros.), Laura (1944, Twentieth Century-Fox) and Double Indemnity (1944, Paramount); but even mainstream honours did not save these films from widespread disparagement by the critical community. In fact Shearer`s main target in his article is Double Indemnity.

Still from 'Quai des brumes', (1938)
The French poetic realist films of the 1930s mixed romantic crime thrillers with fatalism in low-life, fog-shrouded settings. Here deserter Jean (Jean Gabin) tries to save Nelly (Michèle Morgan) from a life of crime.

On the set of 'Attack!' (1956)
Director Robert Aldrich holds a copy of 'Panorama du film noir', the first book about film noir.

Still from 'M' (1931)
Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre, right) leads Elsie Beckmann (Inge Landgut) to her death. He is the archetypal film killer, a mixture of guilt and innocence, who says at some point, "I always feel that somebody is following me... It is myself... Following me."