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Film Noir

"Film noir" is a film genre of American films from the 1940's and 1950's that portrays a deeply corrupt world where the good guys seem helpless to move beyond their pasts and are cynical in their outlook and actions. The term comes from French critics and literally means "black film" reflecting the dark worlds—both literal and metaphoric—that are portrayed in these works.

Key films in the genre include 'The Maltese Falcon' (Huston, 1941), 'Casablanca' (Curtiz, 1942), 'Double Indemnity' (Wilder, 1944), 'Laura' (Preminger, 1944), 'To Have and Have Not' (Hawks, 1944), 'The Lost Weekend,' (Wilder, 1945), 'Murder My Sweet' (Dmytryk, 1945), 'Spellbound' (Hitchcock, 1945), 'The Big Sleep' (Hawks, 1946), 'Gilda' (Vidor, 1946), 'The Killers' (Siodmak, 1946), 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' (Garnett, 1946), 'The Strange Love of Martha Ivers' (Milestone, 1946), 'Key Largo' (Huston, 1948), 'The Naked City' (Dassin, 1948), 'They Live by Night' (Ray, 1949), 'The Asphalt Jungle' (Huston, 1950), 'Gun Crazy' (Lewis, 1950), 'In a Lonely Place' (Ray, 1950), 'Night and the City' (Dassin, 1950), 'Sunset Blvd.' (Wilder, 1950), 'Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival' (Wilder, 1951), 'The Big Heat' (Lang, 1953), 'Pickup on South Street' (Fuller, 1953), and 'Kiss Me Deadly' (Aldrich, 1955).

Film critics also use "noir" by itself as well as for literature:

• “'I really love the challenge of short stories,' Maryland author Laura Lippman told me recently from Texas, where she was touring in support of her best-selling novel What the Dead Know. Ms. Lippman, who has contributed to, among other all-original anthologies, several volumes of Akashic Books' 'Noir Series' (including Dublin Noir, New Orleans Noir, D.C. Noir, as well as Baltimore Noir, which she edited), admitted she will write a short story whenever she's asked to.”—Tom Nolan, “Short Stories, Hard Covers: New Partners in Crime Fiction,” The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2007, p. D10.
• “His character is trying to play it smoother in Fritz Lang’s noir standard 'The Big Heat,' which was also released in 1953 and, happily, is in the series. This is the film in which [Lee] Marvin brutally ups the bad-boyfriend ante by tossing a steaming-hot pot of coffee into the face of his girl (Gloria Grahame), leaving her terribly scarred.”—Manohla Dargis, “Lee Marvin: The Coolest Lethal Weapon,” The New York Times, May 11, 2007.

Sometimes critics are playful with the term. For example, using "film gris" to indicate a film not quite in the standard "film noir" mold: “It’s been said that 'Out of the Past,' with its careful moral gradations reflected in the range of Tourneur’s famously subtle lighting, is less a film noir than a film gris, painted in half-tones.”—Dave Kehr, “New DVDs:  Classic Westerns Round-Up: Volume 1,” The New York Times, May 15, 2007.

How It's Used

"What do we mean when we use the term 'film noir'? It works fine in video stores, yet unlike other genre labels, it removes us from the experiences that contemporary audiences had when they saw the same films. The term derives from a series of thriller novels published in France by Gallimard, 'Série noire,' and superimposing a French identity over American products like 'Double Indemnity' (1944), 'The Big Sleep' (1946), 'Kiss Me Deadly' (1955), and even 'Chinatown' (1974) makes us feel Continental and stylish and therefore less responsive to the films' social meanings than the original American audiences were."

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