THE FILM NOIR IN 1946

As a cycle or even a genre of American film, the film noir is commonly considered to have had its genesis in the early 1940s, although scattered precursors have been identified as far back as the 1920s and the silent film era. First coined by French cineastes in response to a flood of crime films that saw their first exhibitions in France in the immediate wake of World War Two, the term film noir - literally, "black film" - has acquired a host of expansive meanings in the ensuing years.

Perhaps one of the more evocative definitions of the noir style is that given by Francis Nevins, the biographer of one of film noir's literary godfathers, Cornell Woolrich. The noir style, Nevins wrote, is a kind of "bleak, disillusioned study in the poetry of terror," characterized by elements such as "fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings, and a preference for resolutions heavy with dooom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of image."

There were numerous films of this type through the first half of the 1940s, some of them hallmarks of the cycle such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), Murder, My Sweet and Double Indemnity, both from 1944, and Mildred Pierce (1945).

But beginning in 1946, productions of this type of crime film began mushrooming. A hunger for product examining the dark underbelly of society became common across all major Hollywood studios, even though some, like RKO and Columbia, were more renowned for their noir films than others.

What accounted for this relatively sudden explosion of popularity for the film noir? It's probably impossible to account for all of the factors behind film noir's rise in the immediate post-war era, although several main influences immediately spring to mind:

1. The end of World War Two and wartime censorship and rationing
   • Though Hollywood for over a decade had been subject to the thematic constraints of the Production Code, World War Two had imposed new layers of constriction regarding what could and couldn't be dealt with in a film, with matters sensitive to the military strictly off limits, and a propagandistic imperative to rally the home front taking precedence. The at least partial lifting of these constraints suddenly afforded filmmakers considerably more liberty than they had been used to during the war years.
   • At the same time, production crews had had to make do with much less in terms of resources during wartime, as everything from filmstock, to sets and set decoration were affected by rationing. The end of rationing not surprisingly widened filmmakers' canvasses in terms of more abundant location shooting opportunities, and more elaborate sets.
   • Paradoxically however, the limitations imposed by rationing had been a key influence on the development of a characteristic, dark, noir style during the war years, and the perfection of this style in this period resulted in its carryover after the war ended. It also didn't hurt that films could be made with lower budgets by continuing to use the more minimal noir style.
2. Changes in American society and viewer preferences
   • Although the North American mainland, unlike Europe and much of Asia, was untouched by war, knowledge of World War Two's costs and atrocities had a monumental effect on the sensibilities of moviegoers and the society at large. The war's unremitting barrage of reports of bloody battles in the Pacific, Italy, Normandy, and elsewhere, along with the revelation of the horror of Nazi concentration camps at war's end resulted in a kind of collective loss of innocence for previously sheltered North Americans. Viewers were more conditioned to accept and even seek out films that dealt more forthrightly with the darker aspects of society and human nature.
   • Wartime conscription had disrupted the demographic balance by siphoning off able-bodied younger men into military service. Though U.S. casualties were far less in relative terms than suffered by other nations, citizens became used to seeing their men return with varying degrees of physical and psychological wounds at war's end. The figure of the damaged veteran, often depicted as suffering blackouts, amnesia, and severe psychological disturbance, became a stock figure in many film noirs of the immediate post-war period.
3. Noir films made money
   • As the war was drawing to a close, commentators were already beginning to remark on the growing Hollywood appetite for darker-themed crime and murder mysteries. A New York Times article from 1945 opined that one key reason for the growing number of noir-like Hollywood product was that studio executives were taken aback by the box-office success of Paramount's Double Indemnity the previous year, and that "the current crop of hard-boiled, action-packed cinema murders is the time-honored Hollywood production formula of follow-the-leader. Let one studio turn out a successful detective story picture and every other studio in the screen capital follows suit. Result: a surfeit of motion pictures of one type."
   • A corollory of the above is that the end of the war afforded more time and disposable income to devote to leisure pursuits like movie attendance. More available cash, more potential viewers, and an easier film-making climate added up to greater profits for studios if they respected the appetites of their audiences.

THE FILMS

This site begins with the examination of four key film noirs released in 1946: The Blue Dahlia, The Chase, Somewhere In The Night, and The Stranger. As time permits, it is hoped that the list of detailed treatments can be gradually expanded, so that all of these lost films will receive the renewed attention they so richly deserve.