Although French critics coined the epithet “black film,” film noir represents a unique, indigenous American genre. Emerging after the Second World War, noir’s images and plots swirled with moral ambiguity skewed destinies and fractured relationships: inverting the American dream. Urban rather than suburban, sensual rather than domestic, driven by fate rather than any bright future, they spoke of postwar changes, nuclear threats and McCarthyite paranoia.

While underworld films had appeared in the 1930s, noir really erupted in the 1940s, drawing initially on hard-bitten mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, 1941), Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain (screenplay and original novel for Double Indemnity, 1944). Noir was especially identified with RKO, although other companies like Paramount (Double Indemnity) and United Artists (D.O.A., 1949) produced classic examples. As Senator McCarthy evoked the Red specter abroad and at home, production swelled in the 1950s, surviving the dismantling of the studio system.

Production diminished rapidly with changing domestic and foreign concerns of the 1960s: Manchurian Candidate (1962) was withdrawn from circulation because of the dark shades it cast on the Kennedy assassination. Noir also lost to color and new marketing techniques as movies competed with the sunnier worlds of television.

The characteristic visual style of film noir relied on high contrasts in black and white, using night and shadows as primary elements. Camera angles were also less “neutral” than in Hollywood cinema: directing and yet disorienting the viewer. Frames were shattered by intervening objects, and characters were seen only in harsh light from the side or in shadows. Plots, driven by fate rather than logic, were morality plays rather than cogent narratives.

Film noir was also highly urban, underscoring the economic and moral tensions of the postwar city Warehouses, waterfronts, nightclubs and dangerous streets set the stage, although directors also used monumental architecture like train stations, skyscrapers and bridges. New York City, NY, Chicago, IL, and Los Angeles, CA became key noir cities, while “sunny sites” like amusement parks (Strangers on a Train, 1951) or California beaches took on destructive meanings (Kïss Me Deadly, 1955).

Women evidenced new power in film noir. While often duplicitous or even villainous, they moved the action along at the expense of men who were lost, confused or ignorant (Barbara Stanwyck versus Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity). The femme fatale’s slinky costumes, posture and inevitable cigarette identified her as openly sexual—the antithesis of the bright, cheerful suburban housewife. Men, by contrast, were baggysuited detectives, reporters, lawyers, insurance agents or policemen—trapped and destroyed rather than liberated.

Although film noir is identified with B-movies, Orson Welles produced one of the last great noir films in Touch of Evil (1958), while Hitchcock shared elements of noir style.

Moreover, noir continues to fascinate audiences and film-makers as diverse as Godard, John Woo and Wim Wenders. Both the style and the moral ambiguity of noir are used in later American movies like Chinatown (1974), Blade Runner (1982) and LA. Confidential (1997).