Film Noir and the Postwar Shadow

A wounded man limps into a darkened insurance office after midnight. He switches on a dictaphone, and into the machine he begins to confess — how a woman with a gold anklet and a cheap blonde wig talked him into murder, and how it all went wrong. That man is Walter Neff, played by Fred MacMurray in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), and the confession he speaks into the dark is, in a sense, the confession of a whole decade of American movies. Hollywood had spent the war years radiant with Technicolor musicals and morale-boosting flag-wavers. Now, as the soldiers came home, the light drained out of the frame. Rain slicked the streets. Cigarette smoke curled through slatted shadow. The heroes stopped being heroic.

The style did not yet have a name — at least not in America. It took French critics, catching up after the wartime embargo on Hollywood imports finally lifted, to notice what had happened. In 1946 the critic Nino Frank, writing in a Paris film journal about a run of newly arrived American thrillers — The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Murder, My Sweet, Double Indemnity — reached for a phrase to describe their moral murk and midnight palette. He called them film noir: black film. The name stuck, and it points to something important. Noir was never a genre with fixed rules, like the Western or the musical. It was a mood, a lighting scheme, a way of seeing — a style that could infect a detective story, a boxing picture, or a doomed romance alike.

The Shadows Came from Europe

If noir looked like a nightmare imported from somewhere older and colder, that is because, in part, it was. The visual language of noir — the knife-edge contrasts, the pooling blacks, the faces half-swallowed by darkness — descends directly from German Expressionism, the style of Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the fevered urban dread of Weimar cinema. Many of the filmmakers who spoke that language had fled as the Nazis rose to power. Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Edgar G. Ulmer — a generation of European directors landed in Hollywood carrying, along with their accents, a hard-won fluency in shadow. They knew how to make a single desk lamp do the work of despair.

What made that vision spread so fast was money — or the lack of it. Noir was cheap to make. Darkness hid threadbare sets; a wet street at night cost nothing and looked like doom. The style flourished at studios like RKO and in the B-picture units where budgets were thin and ambitions, paradoxically, could run wild. Ulmer shot the delirious road-to-hell picture Detour (1945) in a matter of days for pocket change, and it remains one of the most fatalistic films Hollywood ever produced. Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947) gave the style its definitive leading man in Robert Mitchum — heavy-lidded, unhurried, already half-resigned to his fate — and its most lethal woman in Jane Greer's Kathie Moffat, who shoots a man and keeps walking.

The making of Double Indemnity shows how deliberate the effect could be. Wilder adapted James M. Cain's novella with the hard-boiled novelist Raymond Chandler — a collaboration so contentious the two men could barely stand to share a room — and cast Barbara Stanwyck as the murderous Phyllis Dietrichson, fitting her with a brassy, obviously fake blonde wig. When the phoniness of it drew worried notes, that was precisely the point: the cheapness was the character. The wig told you everything about Phyllis before she opened her mouth.

The Underside of the American Dream

Noir arrived precisely when America had, on paper, won everything. The war was over; the economy was roaring; the suburbs were filling with new families and new appliances. And yet the movies went dark. That contradiction is the whole secret of the form. Noir is the American Dream photographed from below, in the alley behind the house with the white picket fence. Its men are veterans who came home to find they no longer fit — insurance salesmen and private eyes and drifters, all of them one bad decision from the abyss. Its women, the femmes fatales, gave shape to a specific postwar unease about the independent, working women the war years had produced. Stanwyck's Phyllis, Rita Hayworth peeling off a glove in Gilda (1946), Greer's Kathie — they are desire and destruction fused into one figure, and the men who reach for them are always, always destroyed.

What the style really smuggled in was moral ambiguity, and it did so past a vigilant guard: the Production Code, Hollywood's own censorship apparatus, which demanded that crime never pay and virtue always triumph. Noir obeyed the letter and shredded the spirit. Yes, the killers were punished in the final reel — but for ninety minutes the audience had lived inside their skins, felt the pull of the sin, understood exactly why a decent man might throw his life away. The punishment felt less like justice than like the closing of a trap that had been set from the first frame. Against the backdrop of the atomic age and the anti-Communist hysteria of the House Un-American Activities Committee — which was, in these very years, hauling Hollywood writers and directors before it — noir's paranoia and its sense of a rigged, unknowable system did not feel like fantasy at all.

The Trap Snaps Shut

By the end of the cycle the shadows had spread beyond America entirely. Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), written by Graham Greene and shot in the bombed-out ruins of postwar Vienna, is noir carried to its European home ground — tilted camera angles, a face lit suddenly in a doorway, and a plaintive zither score by Anton Karas, a musician Reed reportedly discovered playing in a Viennese wine garden and hired on the spot. At its center is Orson Welles as the racketeer Harry Lime, who delivers, at the top of a Ferris wheel, a defense of his own villainy that Welles himself contributed to the script:

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

It is charming, monstrous, and morally bankrupt all at once, which is to say it is the voice of noir itself. By 1955, the style was curdling into something even harder and stranger. Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly that year replaced the old private-eye mystery with a nuclear one — a glowing box of atomic dread standing in for every buried secret the era refused to name — and pushed noir to the edge of apocalypse.

The classic cycle would flicker on for a few more years, but the world that fed it was already dissolving. Television was pulling audiences out of the theaters; the great studios were being broken up by antitrust rulings; a new wide, bright, spectacular kind of picture was rising to lure people back. The lights were about to come up again — in CinemaScope and blazing color, on screens too big for shadows to hide in. But the darkness noir had found would never fully leave American movies. It had proved something the musicals never could: that the audience wanted the truth about the alley as much as the dream on the porch.