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Film Noir: A Distinctly American Genre
From: American Film Institute
| By:
Vicki Botnick |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Film noir, a French term meaning "black film," was first coined by French newspapers to  describe the dark, bitter moods portrayed by American filmmakers in the early 1940s. John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) ushered in the film noir period in Hollywood, while other great noir classics, including Double Indemnity (1944), The Third Man (1949), Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The French Connection (1971), show how the genre developed over the following 30 years.
In this article, AFI writer and researcher Vicki Botnick (above) gives an overview of the film noir genre and describes how each of these five noir classics contributed to this distinctly American genre. |
 f it's true that a nation's cinema reflects its concerns, then the rise of the film noir genre signaled something deeply disturbed in the American psyche. With its cynical point of view, antiheroic protagonists and the starkly shadowed lighting from which it gained its name, noir spoke to early 1940s society's burgeoning fears. |
World War II's atrocities left its victims and witnesses distrusting government and human nature--an international malaise already emerging in the movies of the 1940s Italian realist film movement. American filmmakers appropriated the Europeans' grim tone and emphasis on documentary detail and added Hollywood's technological prowess, in the form of new wide-angle lenses, distorted but crisply focused close-ups and textured low-key lighting. The result was a genre unique to American film, and an attitude that was unlike anything the Hollywood factory had ever put out. It was a cinema of disillusionment and corruption, with an amoral slant that was a slap in the face to the wholesome values promoted only years earlier in the films of such directors as Frank Capra and Howard Hawks. |
Over the years, noir continued to evolve in both content and form to mirror the mindset of the American public. The following films trace how 1940s skepticism had, by the late '60s, blossomed into an epidemic contempt for the status quo, leading into the 1970s' entirely pessimistic worldview. Then and now, noir and its offshoots almost always focus on crime melodramas, perhaps because the interplay of law and crime offers a perfect metaphor for a civilization in which the boundaries between virtue and vice become more blurred by the hour. |
<I>The Maltese Falcon</I> (1941)
The Maltese Falcon stands today as a multi-tiered landmark: the film not only introduced John Huston as a director, Humphrey Bogart as a good guy and Sydney Greenstreet as an actor in the talkies, it also ushered in the beginning of the film noir genre. |
Part thriller, part mystery, part romance, the Dashiell Hammett story (adapted by Huston) weaves a twisty, sinister tale about a San Francisco detective who, while trying to uncover his partner's murderer, gets wrapped up in an international jewel-smuggling racket. For 1940s audiences, The Maltese Falcon's shadowy atmosphere, bitter tone and downbeat ending were shockingly novel. But by presenting such as bleak message in a story so clever and so skillfully unspooled, Huston crafted a major hit--it won Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Greenstreet)--that set the tone for the future of American filmmaking. At this point, the genre still maintained a vestige of Hollywood principles: Bogart's Sam Spade lives by a code of ethics that, by the end of the film, is profoundly shaken but cannot be destroyed. Although he falls for Mary Astor's devilish dame, in the end Spade remains moral--or at least as moral as a man can be in noir's depraved universe. |
<I>Double Indemnity</I> (1944)
Stories, and especially stories put out by major studios and starring top-line celebrities, don't get much darker than Double Indemnity. James M. Cain's already hard-bitten story was sculpted into an even chillier script by Raymond Chandler--American author of detective fiction who was working in Hollywood for the first time--and director Billy Wilder. |
Fred MacMurray portrays Walter Neff, a bored insurance salesman driven to the depths of degeneracy by Barbara Stanwyck's quintessential femme fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson (a character that revitalized Stanwyck's career). Together, they plot the ultimate crime to murder her husband and collect the insurance claim, using dialogue so razor-sharp that it verges on sexual warfare. In addition, John Seitz's photography established some of noir's defining images, such as venetian-blind slatted shadows and canted camera angles. |
Contemporary critics were dismayed at the film's absolute viciousness, from which not a single note of optimism exists. Instead, the key to the film's allure lies in its central mysteries: Does she really love him? Does either character feel remorse? Is even their physical passion a sham? Trying to discern the answers, and integrate them into the film's desolate ending, keeps modern audiences as fascinated with Wilder's masterpiece as they were sixty years ago. |
<I>The Third Man</I> (1949)
Director Carol Reed had to fight on many fronts to make The Third Man as gritty and disquieting as he wanted: He defied American producer David O. Selznick's orders to cast Noel Coward as Harry Lime and refused to shoot on studio sets; quarreled with screenwriter Graham Greene's original happy ending; and insisted on scoring the movie with Anton Karas' zither music, which went on to become immensely popular. |
Although rumors abound that star Orson Welles wrote and directed his own scenes and European producer Alexander Korda changed much of the story, the triumph of The Third Man belongs to Reed, who fused documentary storytelling with cinematographer Robert Krasker's Expressionistic canted shots. The film's setting--a post-war Vienna that's both politically fractured and physically shattered--serves as an allegory for Cold War, atomic bomb paranoia. Here, men are either weak, as is Joseph Cotten's character Holly Martins, or evil, embodied by Welles' Lime. Welles, who makes a legendary entrance as a presumably dead man emerging out of a doorway's deep shadows, created in Lime the prototypical charming villain. He's an irresistible antagonist: magnetic, chilling and imitated in countless films to follow. |
<I>Bonnie and Clyde</I> (1967)
Just as The Maltese Falcon did in its day, Bonnie and Clyde marked a turning point for the noir genre--and American cinema in general--in both style and substance. Its tone, borrowed from the French New Wave's spirit of experimentalism and volatility, was unlike that of any film made on American soil. (In fact, French directors Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had both expressed interest in the film before director Arthur Penn and star Warren Beatty took it over.) |
Penn created a unique blend of extreme violence, whimsy, politics and tragedy. The plot itself originated what is by now a formula: the buddy picture in which the players are catapulted, by violent acts and media attention, into celebrity. Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Beatty) are young, beautiful and eager to take on the corrupt social order by robbing industrialist banks, but their revolutionary passion is doomed to failure by an adoring media and oppressive social order. |
This encapsulation of late 1960s counterculture ideas hit a note with the public, and the film, beleaguered by studio head Jack Warner and eviscerated by critics, rose to the top of the box office. The last scene, the notorious reign of bullets, provoked a national outcry on the nature of violence in entertainment, a theme still echoed in contemporary debate. |
<I>The French Connection</I> (1971)
Using a minimum of words and maximum of grit, director William Friedkin infused both hyper-reality and a fantasy-like quality to the true story of a New York narcotics bust. The film traces hard-nosed cop Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle as he hunts international heroin trader Alain Charnier with a vulture's ferocity. The needle-thin line between fighting crime and committing it is a key theme in noir, and The French Connection (while perhaps not adhering to classic noir guidelines) takes this idea to its extreme. Being a bad man is precisely what makes Popeye such a good cop. His brutal brand of justice, and its quick results, poses a question for viewers: how much violence should be overlooked in the pursuit of peace? |
The movie is also marked by sharp suspense, arising from cinematographer Owen Roizman's unrelentingly stark photography of the city, together with Friedkin's documentary-like attention to detail and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman's terse script. With so few conversational or visual clues, no explanations are spoon-fed and none of the imagery is restful. Instead, The French Connection assumes its viewers are smart enough to form their own narrative bridges, and forces viewers to be so involved that, along with both the cop and the criminal, they, too, are implicated in the story's ruthlessness. |
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