© William Ahearn 2007
If you have read anything of the history of film noir, this scenario will sound familiar:
“When France was liberated after World War II, Paris film critics noticed the change in American crime movies that were finally being shown in Paris and coined the phrase “film noir” to describe the genre.”
The above paragraph can be tossed in the “everything you know is wrong” file. It is entirely inaccurate and having read the articles written by the French critics and poked a nose in a book or two and spent some time on Google, it can easily be dismissed as nonsense.
The French critics that supposedly coined “film noir” are Nino Frank whose article A New Kind of Police Drama: the Criminal Adventure appeared in August 1946 in L’Ecran Francais and Jean-Pierre Chartier who wrote Americans Also Make Noir Films for La Révue du Cinéma in November 1946. Nowhere in either article do the authors lay any claim to coining the term “film noir.”
Nino Frank’s article uses the term “noir” once. Chartier uses it three times and that includes the instance in the title. In all cases it is obvious that nothing is being coined and it is also obvious that the term “noir” is a reference to an already existing genre of French film. This is evident in Charles O’Brien’s essay, Film Noir in France: Before the Liberation.
O’Brien writes:
“According to the established historiography, the term film noir originated in France circa 1946 to refer to what appeared to be a new tendency in the Hollywood cinema. Research presented below, however, shows that the term, far from a postwar coinage, had, in fact, become essential to film criticism during the years immediately before the war. Moreover, the term originally referred not to Hollywood films but to those French films that a subsequent generation of critics would classify as poetic realist.”
[The PDF of the entire article is available here.]
(In what has to be one of those bizarre twists of fate, O’Brien mentions “Le Dernier Tournant” that was made in France in 1939 as one of the overlooked pre-war French film noirs. “Le Dernier Tourant” is based on The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain. Another film considered part of the pre-war French film noir is “Pepe Le Moko.” It’s a story of a criminal led to his demise for the love of a beautiful woman. It was remade as “Algiers” with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr. One of the writers on the remake was James M. Cain.)
Chartier is explicit in one of his references to French film noir, cites examples and even offers an opinion about how French film noir and the new American films differ:
“There’s been talk of a French school of film noir, but Le Quai des Brunes and L’Hotel du Nord contain some glimmer of resistance to the dark side, where love provides at least the mirage of a better world, where some re-vindication of society opens the door for hope, and even though the characters may despair they retain our pity and our sympathy. There is none of that in the films before us now: these are monsters, criminals and psychopaths without redemptive qualities who behave according to the preordained disposition to evil within themselves.”
Chartier is referring specifically to “Murder, My Sweet,” “Double Indemnity” and “The Lost Weekend” and it is an attempt not to define film noir but to show how the American films differ from what is already known as film noir in France.
Nino Frank is a true film lover and finally reading his article cleared up something that had been bothering me for a long time: How does anyone even remotely consider Otto Preminger’s “Laura” to be noir?
Nino Frank centers on four films, “Laura,” “Double Indemnity,” “Murder, My Sweet,” and to a lesser extent, “The Maltese Falcon.” Frank goes out of his was to separate “Laura” from the others, describing it as belonging to “an outdated genre.” What he’s referring to – and he is explicit in the text – are what we now call Golden Age mysteries. It has always been my opinion that “Laura” is a clever whodunit in the way that Dorothy L. Sayers’ classic Have His Carcase is a clever – not gimmicky – mystery. “Laura” may have been updated with a fedora and a shotgun, but its heart beats in a Golden Age locked room.
In an interview, Robert Porfirio had this exchange with Billy Wilder:
Robert Porfirio: When you started in film, there was a kind of an angst pervading Central Europe after World War I. Did your background, being Jewish in a culture that was becoming rabidly anti-Semitic, create a darker attitude towards life?
Wilder: I think the dark outlook is an American one.
Robert Porfirio: Even in the noir films? So many were made by émigrés: you worked in Europe with [Robert] Siodmak, [Edgar G.]Ulmer, and [Fred] Zinnemann, but also Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger...
Wilder: Where does Preminger figure in film noir?
The entire interview is available here.
Nino Frank states – about “Double Indemnity,” “Murder, My Sweet,” and the “Maltese Falcon” – after separating them from the “traditional crime drama”:
“In this manner these ‘noir’ films no longer have any common ground with run-of-the-mill police dramas.” (Quotation marks around noir in original.)
That’s it. That’s the entire usage of “noir” in the Frank article. The term “noir” has quotation marks not as a coinage – it’s a reference to an already existing body of work in French film.
What is interesting about the Frank article is that he doesn’t suppose a cause for the change in American films. There is no talk of the effects of the war or the isolation of the US during the war years or any reason, Freudian or otherwise. Chartier, however, notes:
“We understood why the Hays Office had previously forbidden film adaptations of James M. Cain’s two novels from which ‘Double Indemnity’ and ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ are drawn. It is harder to understand, given this censor’s moral posture, why this interdiction was lifted, as it’s hard to imagine story lines with a more pessimistic or disgusted point of view regarding human behavior.”
James M. Cain has been called a lot of things and not all of them complimentary. What really bothered Cain was having his work described as “hard boiled.” There were other writers that covered territory more similar to Cain’s than Raymond Chandler’s and they included Cornell Woolrich and Dorothy B. Hughes, among others. The French critics – Frank specifically – sensed the difference between a mystery story such as “Laura” and crime films such as “Murder, My Sweet” and “Double Indemnity.” Chartier went further. Describing Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” as Wilder’s other “noir” film, he notes:
“The impressions of insanity, of a senseless void, left by the drama of a young man in the grip of singular addiction, makes ‘The Lost Weekend’ one of the most depressing movies I have ever seen.”
It needs to be pointed out that Frank and Chartier only saw a handful of new US films when they wrote their articles. Somewhere across the sea, in a shipping office in Hollywood, a whole new crop of films such as “Detour,” “Gun Crazy” and “Out of the Past” waited to be shown on French screens. The difference in these films would be readily apparent from the hard-boiled police and detective dramas.
There is a definition of French film noir that I was able to locate. It appears in A Panorama of American Film Noir by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton. The references to French films have been deleted for clarity:
“[T]he tradition from the years 1935-39 [in French film noir] . . . that’s to say, the fatefulness of destiny, the impossibility of redemption, the brevity of great passions. In the worst of cases, melodrama is involved. In the best, a social study that, for no particular reason, ends tragically.
The definition also notes “a sort of realism attracted by some of the more sordid aspects of existence[.]”
Maybe I’ve missed something along the way. The above does not accurately describe “The Maltese Falcon” or “Murder, My Sweet” or “The Big Sleep.” It does, however, describe “Double Indemnity,” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” The definition also nails the narratives of “Detour,” “Out of the Past,” “Gun Crazy” and numerous other films that would begin being shown around the world.
It’s almost ironic that the French definition of film noir should be printed in A Panorama of American Film Noir. Published in 1955, the book takes what is a simple definition of a film genre and turns it into what Barry Gifford would describe as “academic flapdoodle.”
In Part 3, there’s a look at what may be the worst book of film criticism ever written and how bad scholarship totally ruined any possibility of a reliable definition of film noir.