SUNDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2025

SPOILER ALERT: As always with essays about movies, this warning is required. I’ve tried my best not to reveal too much of the plots of the films I mention here, but not divulging them at all is frankly impossible.

In one sense, film noir never existed. It wasn’t an artistic movement like Cubism or Dada or the Nouvelle Vague in which a group of artists created works under a common label as part of a self-conscious artistic project. There were no manifestos announcing a revolution in film-making, no coruscating demolitions of past filmic traditions and a call to make it new. The directors, actors, scriptwriters, set designers, cinematographers, lighting technicians and cameramen generally saw themselves as makers of disposable thrillers and crime films, and would probably be shocked if they were alive today to see their work still remembered and so highly regarded. The label ‘film noir’ was penned by the French critic, Nino Frank, in 1946, when these American films suddenly became accessible in post-war France, but didn’t enter popular use in the US until the 1970s, so the period that is generally considered to be the defining moment of film noir – from 1940 to 1958 – was over by the time the phrase became common currency in the English-speaking world.

My own awareness of noir as a genre or style or mood or whatever it is (this will be briefly discussed in the next paragraph) came when I first saw Murder, My Sweet (the 1944 version) on television. I must have watched other films before then which have become part of the noir canon because watching old black-and-white films on TV late at night was an important part of my adolescence, but I had never seen anything quite like the dream sequence in Murder, My Sweet, when the protagonist is suffering the effects of a drug he has been given, and the surrealistic images of him hurtling through doors and tumbling through space knocked me out. I’d probably seen Dalí’s work in Hitchcock’s Spellbound by then, but that was more consciously artistic and the scenes from Murder, My Sweet struck me as rougher around the edges and I liked that. This began long years of discovery as I took in more and more of the classic noir catalogue and grew to love so many of its films.

So what is noir: genre, style or mood? This is one of two burning questions that divide fans and critics alike and often lead to verbal fisticuffs. For me it is unanswerable, but I tend towards seeing it as a mood or style rather than a genre because it lacks the defining certainties of genres like westerns or musicals. The second question is which components are essential to noir and, more divisively, which would disqualify a film from the category (such as colour, not falling between the years of 1940-58, a rural setting, the lack of a tragic ending, having no femme fatale, and so on). I have belonged to several online noir groups but in many of them most of the time is spent arguing whether specific films (notably Rope and several other Hitchcocks, Leave Her to Heaven, The Seventh Victim, The Third Man, The Letter, The Night of the Hunter) classify as noir rathering than discussing the films themselves, their merits and their occasional demerits. I have to admit that I find this tedious in the extreme, as if the label is more important than the work.

To compile a brief list of elements which are generally listed as essential to noir, or at least as extremely common: urban settings and hard-boiled characters in a criminal demi-monde, convoluted plots and the use of flashback as a way of telling the story, an edgy, distorted visual style that uses expressionistic lighting and camerawork, a flawed male hero, a treacherous femme fatale, moral complexity, a sense of fatalism and impending doom. Not many of the films have all of these elements, though, which makes the ticking of boxes and squabbling over whether a film is noir or not a redundant exercise in my opinion.

One of the main ingredients that went into the mix that became film noir was pulp fiction: hard-boiled detective stories and novels by people like Chandler, Dammett and Cain, all of whose works were adapted for noir. These were set in the violence and corruption of the underworld in big cities, as were the gangster movies of the 1930s which are in some ways a cinematic precursor of film noir. In the gangster films, however, there is still a clear division between the cops and the criminals, with much more moral certainty than the murky world of noir, and their leading gangster characters are broadly psychopathic in their lust for absolute power. These movies offered the audience the vicarious pleasure of glimpsing a world beyond morality where power equalled freedom to do whatever one wished, with the comforting inevitability of order being restored in the final scene. Psychopaths exist in noir as well, (Udo in Kiss of Death and Chester in D.O.A.), but they are few and far between, and the motivation of most noir characters is more impenetrable. The city and its dangerous underbelly remains the setting of film noir but it becomes a slippery world where almost everyone has blood on their hands and very few are truly innocent.

This lack of a clear morality required plotting that was much more complex than the gangster film, and many of the plots of noir movies are byzantine. The most notorious in this regard is The Big Sleep, adapted from a novel by Chandler, who admitted that he wasn’t sure himself who murdered one of the characters in his book. So noir is full of twists and turns and unexpected revelations: true friends who are secretly enemies or whose friendship turns to betrayal when it’s to their advantage, and beautiful and elegant women who turn out to be scheming, avaricious femmes fatales, so neither the characters themselves nor the audience is ever quite sure who to trust, and the answer to this is often no one. And while this not knowing who is guilty is shared by the popular detective whodunits of the time featuring sleuths like Charlie Chan, Mr Moto, Mr Wong, Sherlock Holmes and the Thin Man, the sophistication of the plotting and motivation in film noir belongs to a different universe. This is not a QED world where the villain is unmasked at the end.

In practical terms, one way of presenting this complexity is the flashback: many of the greatest noirs (Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, The Killers) use this device, even flashback within flashback at times, creating a fascinating glitterball that dazzles as it diverts and deceives. Often this is accompanied by a voiceover by one of the characters, usually the protagonist, but we often can’t be sure that the version of the story he is telling is accurate or true (Detour, The Chase). Finally, the trust that we normally place in the camera as the all-seeing eye is undermined in so many of these movies and once we become familiar with noir, we learn to radically mistrust it.

One of the obvious ways in which we immediately recognise that film noir is different from the usual Hollywood fare of the time is in its use of camerawork and lighting, as I explained when I began this blog by describing my first viewing of Murder, My Sweet. A similar nightmare sequence unfolded in the film which is often now accepted as the very first fully-fledged film noir: Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). This film, which was generally slated by the critics at the time, uses many of the expressionist techniques which are now seen as integral to noir: stylised sets, unusual camera angles, jagged diagonals, the use of light and shadow, lighting which heightens the atmosphere rather than just illuminates the scene. A group of great cinematographers lit and filmed many of the best noirs, most famously Alton, Musaraca, Howe and Saitz, lifting their contribution from a necessary background feature to a central defining element of the films. The monochrome of black and white is used to great effect, creating chiaroscuro lighting reminiscent of painters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio. Motifs emerged that are repeated again and again: the shadows of the slats of venetian blinds on the walls of a room, flashing neon signs, seedy hotel rooms, gloomy, vertiginous staircases, streetlamps casting a patch of light into a deep encroaching darkness, faces half-hidden in shadow to suggest duplicity, jarring diagonals that slash across the screen and remove our comfortable feeling that we are witnessing normal reality.  

This aesthetic is generally agreed to have its roots in the German Expressionist films of the 1920s and the subsequent flight of many of its workers from the Nazis: artists and technicians who ended up in Hollywood and transformed the visual style of the movies that Tinseltown produced. In terms of camerawork and lighting in particular, these visual tropes were not limited to noir, and many films in a range of genres drew on similar techniques, if not taking them to the same extremes. This is hardly surprising; before the introduction of colour, it made sense to make as much use of contrast as possible in a world of black and white, as also happened in photography. But noir took this to another level, fundamentally disrupting the cinematic mimesis of everyday American reality by adding more than a hint of the distorted, nightmare world of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

In the classic detective story or whodunnit, the sleuth is a logical mastermind who coolly solves the crime; in early noir, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), much remains of this imperturbable rationality but little cracks are already starting to appear in the hard-bitten facade. As the mood of noir gets stronger through the 1940s, this fragility in the male hero grows ever more marked, so that by the time of Phantom Lady (1944), Detour (1945), Somewhere in the Night (1946) and D.O.A. (1950), the rugged masculine shell has truly begun to crumble. In the first of these films he is languishing in jail while his female secretary solves the crime; in the second he is a whingeing failure and a very unreliable narrator; in the third he is a war veteran suffering from amnesia struggling to piece together his lost past life; in the last, he is doomed to die within twenty-four hours having drunk a poisoned drink intended for somebody else. This has led to critics often referring to the crisis in masculinity in film noir, especially in the later period. The swagger of the hard-boiled detective becomes a faltering indeterminacy and the tough guy who was the architect of his own destiny becomes a passive victim of fate.

The role of women in film noir is highly contentious. The most famous character type is that of the scheming and treacherous femme fatale: Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past, Kitty Collins in The Killers. Nearly all femmes fatales, though, use their beauty to attach themselves to a wealthy man, so they are essentially defined by their physical appearance and often rewarded with jewels and mink coats as the trophy of an alpha male. They are also frequently contrasted to the ‘girl next door’, the good girl who is loyal to the hero but is discarded for the sexual allure of the femme fatale, as happens in Out of the Past and The Killers and a host of other noirs. So the femme fatale can be interpreted as a negative representation from a feminist viewpoint in the sense that she is defined through the lens of the typical male gaze, and, although she refuses to conform to society’s norms and take her proper role as wife and emotional support for her man, she must one day face the consequences of this; on the other hand, she has an energy and intelligence and vibrancy that the docile girl next door never shows. The femme fatale is a smart cookie who uses the weakness of men to get what she wants.

In the world of film noir, there is hardly any depiction of domesticity, and, on the few occasions when there is, it is seen as a ball and chain that the male protagonist dreams of escaping. But the only way out of this cul-de-sac is disaster and usually death. In D.O.A., for example, the central character is on a business trip to the big city and enjoying his freedom from his rather needy girlfriend when he drinks the poisoned slug that will doom him. Pitfall is an interesting noir which has many elements of the ‘woman’s film’ because it makes this split – which is often only latent in noir films – between suburban security and the alluring perils of the big city into the central theme of the movie. Unusually, neither he nor his wife die on this occasion, but their marriage is in pieces at the end. A twist on this theme comes in Too Late For Tears, another of those rare noirs in which we see more of a suburban home than we do glitzy nightclubs and sleazy hotels, except this time it is the wife who longs to escape her drab suburban existence while her dreary husband argues for the decency of their simple, lower-middle-class life. She eventually achieves her dream but only by committing murder, including that of her husband, so the wages of sin mean that she dies in the final scene by tumbling from the balcony of her swanky hotel suite.  

It is difficult for the contemporary viewer to see the moral ambiguity that permeates film noir through the eyes of the audience of the time. For example, the corrupt cop of movies like Fallen Angel, Touch of Evil and Kansas City Confidential, and the cop who is taken off the case by his superiors but continues to investigate as in The Big Heat and The Big Combo, have become clichés of contemporary film to the extent that we would be more surprised by an honest cop than a rogue one. These days we expect or perhaps demand moral ambiguity, even in our comic book superheroes. But in a world where the Production Code insisted that the wages of sin must be death and virtue must reign triumphant in the end, the greater honesty and subtlety of noir must have been astonishing at the time. This was also true of noir’s depiction of sexuality in an age where anything more than a peck on the cheek between husband and wife was proscribed, and suggestions of sex outside marriage (Scarlet Street, The Maltese Falcon), adultery (The Blue Dahlia, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The File on Thelma Jordon), or any hint of homosexuality (The Maltese Falcon, Gilda, The Big Combo) were more or less prohibited. Any honest depictions of sexuality had to be buried in the subtext or the semiotics of glances and the lighting of cigarettes, or turned into images of crashing waves on a beach or the joke of Hitchcock’s train entering a tunnel at the end of his non-noir North by Northwest.

A final key ingredient of noir is its sense of fatalism and doom. In very few of these films is there ever any sense that these characters might play a role in forging their own destiny. One very common image is that of the protagonist running through city streets as he is pursued, representing his futile aim to escape his fate (Night and the City, Sweet Smell of Success). Perhaps the most upfront depiction of this sense of helplessness before destiny is Al Roberts in Detour, when he says that ‘Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all’. Or sometimes the failure to escape is more ironic, as in The Asphalt Jungle, where one of the gang on the run from the cops lingers in a bar to leer at a young girl dancing and because of this delay in crossing the border to safety is caught and arrested: when fate is not malevolent, we will make it so through our weaknesses and lusts.

I would like to mention two more things about the noirs of the 1940s and 50s before I draw this essay to a close. The first is that the majority of these films were B-movies without the lavish budgets of A-films, intended only as the inferior film to warm up the audience in a double feature. This lack of funds meant that artistic imagination had to replace the wodge of cash that the A-films received, and the directors, actors, writers and filmographers of noir certainly stepped up to the plate. Many of the things which we see as its defining achievements – the lighting and camerawork in particular – came down to making the most of its limited resources. This is typified by Detour, a ‘Poverty Row’ film, which serves as a perfect example and took only six days to shoot. The second is that the audiences of the time consisted of people of all ages, so there was an adult quality to most of the films produced, both noir and non-noir, aimed at the general population rather than the younger demographic who later became the main audience at cinemas. Going to ‘the flicks’, as we used to say in the UK, was something everyone did and an important part of a weekly routine. For instance, my name is Alan because my mother, a working-class woman who was certainly not a film buff, liked an actor called Alan Ladd; when she first told me this, I had no idea that I was named after one of the top male actors in film noir in movies like The Glass Key and This Gun For Hire. So maybe noir is right after all, our destiny is pre-determined, and I was ordained to love these films.

Many people will disagree with me when I say this, but in my opinion this mixed demographic meant that movies often dealt with more serious issues than today’s Marvel superheroes or stories of good versus evil (and I am not speaking only of noir, but other forms such as the ‘woman’s film’ and even the ‘melodrama’ and the western). To be more precise, perhaps I should say serious issues in the daily emotional lives of ordinary people, for most movies eschewed direct political opinion (although often contained covert political content, especially in the war years in the first half of the 1940s). But these issues were generally secondary to the narrative: for instance, I could compile a list of the issues of a film like Sweet Smell of Success – power, ambition, control, the lies and distortions of the media, corruption by police and those who hold power – but these are rarely discussed or examined directly. Audiences were treated as intelligent human beings, so movies tended to avoid both the triviality and pretension which mark the two extremes of Hollywood movie-making today.  

Sadly, film noir has become something of a cash cow; more and more films are being ‘rediscovered’ or reinterpreted as noir. Most of these are worth a watch, if rarely the ‘hidden gem’ they are claimed to be, but many are only marginally ‘noir’, which is adding to the vagueness of the label and spreading it ever wider until it becomes almost meaningless. Aimed at cultural dinosaurs like me, and based on films which are often not under copyright, packaging these obscure films of the past as ‘little-known noir classics’ represents a chance for an astute entrepreneur to make a quick buck. But the ubiquity of the noir label that results puts it in danger of losing its unique identity.

Any noir aficionados who read this blog will see it as Film Noir 101. I’m certainly not claiming I’m saying anything groundbreaking in this essay, which is aimed squarely at the uninitiated. It’s also meant as a tribute: I love these films and see them as the peak of Hollywood movie-making. Any of the ones I have deliberately listed here could become a reader’s equivalent of my viewing of Murder, My Sweet, a first step into the shadowy world of noir. But I must warn them – if they get the vibe and are bitten by the bug, it could prove to be addictive.