By Michael Bayer
In their groundbreaking 1955 book, A Panorama of Film Noir: 1941-1953, French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton wondered what film noir would become. Specifically, they wrote, “The debate remains open, and only the future will tell us whether the noir series was something other than a season of hell.” Intentionally or not, by referring to noir as a “series” and a “season,” they were dismissing the notion of film noir as a distinct genre, instead classifying it as a specific phenomenon over a specific period of time.
But when exactly did this “season of hell” begin and end? What are the right dates for demarcating the film noir cycle? Was John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) the first noir? What about Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)? Do we go all the way back to Germany in 1931 with Fritz Lang’s M? (Notably, all three of these films star Peter Lorre.) Is Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) the official end of noir? Then, what about J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1962)? How about Melville’s later films or all those Japanese yakuza films from the 1960’s? This kind of debate is perfectly appropriate and signifies continued enthusiasm for the film noir cycle. Let’s hope the issue is never fully settled.
Many have suggested dates, phases, and frameworks for circumscribing noir. For example, in his highly influential 1972 essay, filmmaker Paul Schrader subdivided noir into three broad phases: the wartime period (1941-1946); the (overlapping) postwar realistic period (1945-1949); and the psychotic, suicidal period (1949-1953). Historian Andrew Spicer suggests a breakdown along the lines of uncertain beginnings (1940-1943), a major burst of energy (1944-1952) and fragmentation and decline (1952-1959). Editor Robert Porfirio expanded to four phases: experimentation (1936-1943), studio-bound (1944-1947), location/semi-documentary (1948-1952), and fragmentation and decay (1953-1960).
In terms of periodization, Heart of Noir favors Porfirio’s expansive recommendation but adds a “long tail” that extends noir further into the 1960’s to capture the outstanding international work created during this sunset phase. The precise dates don’t really matter. What’s informative are the various changes and dynamics that drove the evolution of the cycle not just in the United States but as a worldwide phenomenon.
During the Depression era of the 1930’s, movie theaters provided inexpensive entertainment, so audiences flocked to the big screen, sometimes on a daily basis. To keep them staying in the theaters longer and consuming more over-priced refreshments (the largest studios owned theaters too), producers made shorter, lower-budget B films to exhibit before the more prestigious, highly marketed A films. These B films, almost always genre pictures, would provide countless opportunities for directors, many from Europe, to experiment creatively without too much risk. These opportunities, and the attendant budget restrictions which demanded innovation, were an important factor in the development of noir.
In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, most of the B films in the crime genre were serials. Recycling the same sets, casts, and crews maximized cost efficiency, so mystery tales featuring Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, Boston Blackie, Michael Shayne, and the Thin Man, among many others, hit the theaters sometimes multiple times per year. Offering a predictable movie experience to fans, these serial B films were generally lighthearted with plenty of comic relief, mostly interior settings, and tidy, happy endings. Years before the hardboiled school had reached Hollywood, these films capitalized on the popularity of screwball comedies, which began falling out of favor by 1940.
One of the most prolific film noir directors, Fritz Lang, arrived in Hollywood during this period, rumored to have rejected Adolph Hitler’s offer to run the Nazi film industry. With his first American film, Fury (1936), Lang had already hit exactly the right note for noir. In a story strongly echoing his German hit, M (1931), an innocent man is arrested for kidnapping a child, so the local residents rise up to exact their own brand of justice by burning down the jail with him inside. (This kind of subject matter was a far cry from Charlie Chan at the Circus.) Lang’s follow-up, You Only Live Once (1937), was equally dark and fatalistic. Both of these films experimented with visual techniques that would become part of the noir palette. They’re sometimes called “proto-noirs.”
Meanwhile, in Europe, French poetic realism was in full swing. Directors like Jean Renoir (La Bête Humaine, 1938), Julien Duvivier (Pepe le Moko, 1937), and Marcel Carné (Port of Shadows, 1938) were creating stylized realism, depicting gritty criminal stories with romantic lighting and set design. While the UK was more focused on war and espionage stories during this period, British producers released a handful of criminal suspense tales. Perhaps the most masterful specimen of early British noir is Brian Desmond Hurst’s On the Night of the Fire (1939), released in the United States as The Fugitive. The story of a struggling barber who becomes a murder suspect after stealing money to improve his family’s lot in life, the film creates an oppressive, doom-laden atmosphere using expressionistic lighting and unusual (for the time) camera setups.
As more European filmmakers fled the war and moved to Los Angeles, a new degree of intellectualism and artistry collided with Hollywood money and optimism. This clash sparked one of the most creative movements of the 20th century, with movie ticket sales reaching a historical peak in 1944. As most of the expatriates were German (Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, Edgar Ulmer, Curtis Bernhardt, etc.), many insiders referred colloquially to the “Hollywood German School” and, of course, the area most impacted by this Germanization was film noir.
While he wasn’t German, Orson Welles had an enormous influence on the development of noir, his RKO masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941) a showcase of baroque filmmaking techniques which would help invent the noir look at RKO and other studios. Citizen Kane was released the same year the United States entered the war that Europe had already been fighting for several years. Some countries, such as the UK, had virtually abandoned any form of pessimistic, noir-like filmmaking in favor of lighthearted diversions and wartime propaganda. When the war ended in 1945, European production slowly ramped back up with a surge of postwar realism that involved location shooting and a total lack of glamour and gloss. In particular, Italian neorealism represented postwar miseries with extraordinary impact and transformed cinema around the world, including in Hollywood, where more noir directors were moving their film shoots outside.
Most importantly, film noir was identified and named during this period (it wouldn’t become a standard term in the cinema lexicon for a few more decades). After the war ended, a group of American films from the previous few years were finally introduced to French theaters all at once: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Woman in the Window (1944). One Parisian critic, Italian-born Nino Frank, noted the shift in tone. Compared to the American crime films that had come before, these were dark and despairing, the criminals more violent, the stories more psychological. A friend of James Joyce and fan of surrealism, Frank published an article in the August 1946 issue of L’Ecran Francais in which the phrase “film noir” appeared for the first time. Titled “Un nouveau genre policier: L’aventure criminelle” (“A New Crime Genre: Criminal Adventure”), Frank’s article described the films’ emphasis on “criminal psychology” and “the dynamism of violent death.” He wrote that these new films “no longer have anything in common with the usual type of detective film.” Thus began France’s unending love affair with noir.
Strictly in terms of production output, the peak year for film noir was 1950, when an estimated 12 percent of U.S. feature films could be classified as noir. The top three studios for noir production were RKO, Warner Brothers, and Columbia, with RKO most associated with the visual style and Columbia widely recognized as having most effectively achieved the mood of hopelessness.
A significant distinction of 1950’s film noir was the use of location shooting and the resulting reduction in expressionist lighting. With advances in camera technology and a continued need to cut costs (sound stages were expensive), noir emerged from the shadows and faced the cold light of day. Evil assaulted the viewer’s senses without the same degree of visual distortion or subtlety in earlier noirs. We even had a growing number of noirs filmed in vivid Technicolor; the more spectacular-looking the film, the theory went, the more it would lure audiences away from the intimate stories on their television sets.
Noir characters lost their subtlety too. What Schrader called “psychotic” behavior was like the release of a pressure valve. More noir protagonists were out-of-control, off their rockers, victims of mental illness. Violence became more random. The security of suburbs was turned upside down. Reinforcing the threat of a Cold War atomic apocalypse, more explosions, literally and figuratively, punctuated noir plots.
The noir cycle seemed to be heading toward the total nihilism it had resisted for so long. Appropriately, the exclamation point on this decade would be Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). In fact, some critics have cited Psycho as not just a turning point in the noir cycle, or even just in film, but impacting American culture as much as the Kennedy assassination.
The 1950’s saw the first book-length analysis of film noir published. Even in 1955, Borde and Chaumeton’s Panorama noted the difference between decades. The critics wrote, “The strangeness of noir gave way to realism after 1950.” As with postwar, realistic European cinema, the hidden worlds of Freudian psychology were replaced by realistic, obvious anger and pain. This meant more pathology and more cruelty.
B films ceased to exist by the end of the 1950’s, and noir was all but dried up. With the Baby Boomers reaching young adulthood and suburban prosperity opening up new leisure opportunities, audience tastes and market opportunities had changed. Psycho symbolized this turning point. Audiences wanted less crime and more shocks and thrills, so exploitation films exploded in popularity. A short-lived series of “hag-sploitation” or “psycho-biddy” films resurrected Golden Age divas (Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland) to perform in over-the-top movies about crazy maniacs, such as Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and William Castle’s Strait-Jacket (1964). The explosive population of teen-agers was drawn to juvenile delinquency films like High School Confidential (1958), The Sadist (1963), Kitten with a Whip (1964), and even West Side Story (1961).
Meanwhile, the French New Wave was about to change cinema forever. Unsurprisingly, given France’s fascination with noir, two of the New Wave’s earliest and most pivotal films borrowed story and style from the cycle: Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). In fact, perhaps symbolizing a grand handoff from one era to the next, Godard dedicated his film to Monogram Pictures, the former Poverty Row studio.
The impact of the French New Wave on Hollywood would take a bit longer, but with the vestiges of the Production Code having crumbled to nothing by the mid-1960’s, New Hollywood took over the industry, and the Golden Era, including film noir, was history. Some might argue, however, that noir never ended but was integrated into mainstream cinema by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, and Paul Schrader, among many others. New Hollywood thrived on explicit violence, moral disillusionment, and self-destructiveness, so perhaps the heart of noir never stopped beating. This is why Heart of Noir doesn’t recognize neo-noir as a film category. Classic noir was organic, uncorrupted, and unselfconscious, while neo-noir, a term often used to describe noir-like films produced since the 1960’s, exists primarily for marketing and/or comparison purposes. Film noir’s influence on modern cinema has been incalculable, and we’d prefer to leave it at that.
Europe and Asia got a late start on film noir because they were busy with the second world war, so it makes sense that the noir cycle in these markets went on a bit longer too. While American noir peaked in 1950 and was finished by 1960, minus a few later exceptions, the late 50’s and early 60’s proved to be an extremely fertile period for noir outside the United States, especially in Europe and Japan. We might call this noir’s “long tail.”
Enormous quantities of film production equipment had been destroyed or pilfered during the war, so rebuilding economies, studios, and postwar production capacity had taken some time. Mature cinema markets like the UK, France, and Italy had been able to release noir throughout the 1940’s and early 1950’s but the style and mood of noir wasn’t fully realized around the world until the late 1950’s. This very late period saw a variety of excellent, full-throttle noirs from cinemas relatively unknown to American audiences, like Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and South Korea. The noir influence was also felt in the proliferation of low-budget crime films, often produced and released as serials, in several European markets during this period.
Just as B films were declining in the US during the latter 1950’s, the UK ramped up second feature production. These low-budget, low-quality films were made by independent production companies like Danziger Brothers, Butcher’s Film Service, and Hammer Films, which released a series of late-period psychological noirs, such as Paranoiac (1963) and Nightmare (1964). In 1960, two independent producers acquired the rights to all fiction by prolific mystery writer Edgar Wallace and launched Edgar Wallace Mysteries, a second-feature series of 47 films produced at Merton Park Studios and Anglo-Amalgamated. The last of these was released in 1965 just as the British double bill had come to an end and small crime films had been replaced with big spy films, notably the James Bond franchise.
Speaking of Edgar Wallace, his fiction inspired an extensive film series in West Germany too, leading to a new genre called the krimi (kriminalfilm). Launched by Danish company Rialto Film, which had acquired exclusive German-language rights for nearly all Wallace novels, the series of low-budget second features was enormously popular; a total of 39 krimis were released throughout the 1960’s.
Italy also saw the birth of a new genre influenced by film noir. Giallo (“yellow”), named for the color of cheap paperback crime novels, especially those published by Mondadori, were crime thriller films that followed a standard storyline (a beautiful girl in Rome is targeted by a black-gloved serial killer) and blended a horror atmosphere, slasher-type violence, and eroticism. Shot in vivid color that made the blood as bright as possible, the first giallo, Mario Bava’s The Evil Eye (1963), was also the only one shot in black and white.
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