The term film noir was first used in something like its contemporary meaning in 1946 by French film critic Nino Frank.  The occasion was a particular week in which five films made earlier in Hollywood but unavailable to French audiences during the war opened in Paris.
All of them had dark themes and reminded Frank of American pulp fiction from the 30s.

Much of this fiction had been published in France under the Série Noire (“Black Series”) imprint and so Frank, logically enough, labeled the five films films noirs.  [The term film noir had earlier been applied to a series of moody, poetic French films from the 1930s which dealt with the travails of working-class people, but these had little in common with the crime thrillers Frank was talking about.]  Three of the films, Murder, My Sweet (above, at the top of the post), Double Indemnity and The Phantom Lady were in fact based on the work of pulp fiction writers — Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.  The Woman In the Window, below, was more in the line of a Hitchcockian psychological thriller, a form Hitchcock had mastered before the war.  Laura was a fairly standard murder mystery, a form that also predated WWII, though very elegantly executed.

In truth, there was nothing terribly new about the five films Frank called films noirs, though all were perhaps a little darker and edgier in tone than similar Hollywood films from before the war had been.  Because the French had not been able to see the gradual development of this tone during the war years, it came as something of a revelation.

But after 1946 a new film tradition emerged which diverged from the hardboiled detective fiction of the 30s — and from the rancid domestic dramas of Cain and from the
Hitchcockian suspense thriller and from the classic murder mystery.  It was a body of work which specifically addressed post-war, atomic age anxieties.

In this body of work, the underworld of pulp fiction seemed to have become the only world.  Its protagonists were not wisecracking knights errant who ventured onto the wild side of things to solve a crime, nor were they everymen forced to brave an ordeal to become stronger and wiser, nor were they committed criminals, following transgressive urges to an inevitable and cautionary doom, a doom which restored society’s moral norms.  They were men in a state of existential despair, unsure of how the world worked anymore, at the mercy of strong women, morally bewildered.  The doom they often met with solved nothing, restored nothing.  It was, in a sense, an expression of the post-traumatic stress disorder of the generation which had fought WWII and could never again see “normal” life in the same way again — especially not in the enduring shadow of nuclear annihilation.

This new tradition naturally enough inheirited the label film noir, even though it was quite distinct from the kinds of films that inspired Frank’s use of the label, the kinds of films out of which the new tradition emerged.

The imprecision of the term film noir was thus built into its history, so to speak.  Most of the films we now think of as classic films noirs were made after the term was applied by Frank.  They eventually came to constitute a distinct cycle, which flourished for more than a decade before it played itself out toward the end of the 50s.

I think the time has come to consider this cycle apart from the kinds of films that were first called films noirs — and I think the only sensible way to do this is to violate the history of the term film noir and to apply it only to the distinct cycle that emerged, for the most
part, after the term’s invention.  In fact, I would argue that none of the five films that inspired Frank’s application of the term really belong to the tradition of the classic film noir.

In the interest of clarity and a sharper kind of analysis, we need to distinguish film noir
from the various traditions out of which it developed.  [And we certainly need to distinguish it from the poetic proletarian French tragedies that were first called films noirs back in the 30s.]  Pulp fiction, or hardboiled detective fiction, are terms that serve perfectly well to label the sort of films made from the works of writers like Chandler, Woolrich and Cain.  Hitchcockian is a term that serves perfectly well to label the sorts of thrillers he specialized in.  Murder mystery is a term that serves perfectly well to describe a film like Laura.  The cycle of films that emerged after WWII, what might be called the atomic-age crime thriller, was something else again and it needs its own label . . . film noir.

World War Two was a “good war”.  America and its allies pulled together
and destroyed the Axis powers.  On balance, and in retrospect, it
has to be considered one of the great achievements of
humane civilization.  But human beings don’t live on balance or in
retrospect, particularly where war is concerned.  They live inside
the horror of it and it takes a toll on individuals and on societies
which can never be fully measured.

The upbeat spirit of American propaganda during the war, and the
genuine satisfactions of victory, veiled the true experience of the war
for millions — not just for those who fought it on the battlefields of the
world, but for those at home who lived in terror that their loved ones at
the front might never return . . . and of course, most especially, for those at home whose loved ones didn’t return.  On a broader level, anyone who simply witnessed
the spectacle of total war on a global scale, from whatever distance, had
to have experienced a soul-shaking anxiety about the fragility of all
social structures and cultural norms.

After WWII, the whole planet experienced post-traumatic stress disorder
— localized in this case by the fact of the atomic bomb, which ended
the war but left the world with a paradox that wouldn’t go away.
It took an act of colossal horror to finally “win” this good
war.  And the prospect of this horror being again visited on the
world was far from unimaginable.

We now know a lot more than we used to about post-traumatic stress
disorder and the ways it can be treated.  In the immediate post-war era, the
phenomenon was more elusive, and often unrecognized.  We made
meaningful social restitution to the veterans of the war, with measures like
the G. I. Bill — we reconstructed the devastated nations we
conquered.  But that just scratched the surface.

It was in art that the true psychic cost of the war was exposed and explored — nowhere more pointedly than in film noir.  The sort of trauma that engenders PTSD is identifiable by several characteristics — a sense of being out of control and confused, a
sense of terror, a sense of being outside the normal realm of human
experience.  Is there a better description of the usual
predicament of the protagonist in a classic film noir?

PTSD on a broad cultural and societal level is what best explains the phenomenon of film noir, which on its surface is so mysterious.  Why should a triumphant
nation, after a great collective victory in a good war, have been
gripped by that mood of existential dread which informs so many Hollywood films of the post-war era?  Why should the most spectacular achievement of American arms have led
to a crisis of manhood, a sense of impotence, a fear of powerful women
incarnated in the morbid fantasy of the femme fatale?

Film noir was a dream landscape where the buried costs of WWII could be recognized, reckoned and mourned, as a prelude to psychic recovery, or at least psychic survival.
Veterans of combat often report the difficulty of dealing with people
who have not shared their experience of it — people who can never
really know what it’s like.  Film noir, far more than the WWII combat film, was one of the few arenas of American life where the true legacies of war, its lingering moral and
psychological dislocations, could be engaged without apology or shame.

Meanwhile Joe D'Augustine from Film Forno sends this comment on Odds Against Tomorrow:


“This
is a great movie! One of Jean Pierre Melville's favorites. Ryan and
Belafonte are amazing. Bravo to HB for financing it, that took guts and
no wonder it dealt with the frustrations of a black American male so
honestly. It was also one of the first films edited by DeDe Allen, her
next was The Hustler. The old cop who got screwed out of his pension is
excellent as well. Ed Begley, Is he corrupt or was he turned corrupt by
a corrupt system? I guess he is on a friendly basis with the
bookie/gangster. And he is the mastermind of the big steal. Great
locations, it is one of Wise's best! He really made all kinds of films
and made them well.”

The dark view of the world reflected in traditional film noir
found expression in other kinds of Hollywood movies, ones which didn't
necessarily reflect a preoccupation with specifically male anxieties or
use the night-time urban underworld as an image.  A strong tradition emerged
which centered on the home and domestic relationships and the ways
these seemed to be threatened by the colossal derangement of war on a
global scale and later by the specter of nuclear annihilation.  Here are some of the films I see as representative
of this tradition:

Shadow Of A Doubt

Double Indemnity
Clash By Night
Blonde Ice


Leave Her To Heaven

Sunset Boulevard
The Night Of the Hunter

Scarlet Street
Daisy Kenyon
The Bad and the Beautiful




American homes weren't physically threatened by the violence
of WWII, at least not directly, but millions of sons and husbands and fathers from those homes
were sent out into harm's way — and the whole scale of the war seemed
to be a threat to the very idea of social order, to the very idea of
home and family as the bonding agents of civilization.

The Night Of the Hunter is, in my opinion, way too poetic, metaphorical and explicitly religious to be called a film noir, but it's certainly a dark film, and it deals with the issues of collapsed manhood that also informed the classic films noirs.  If anything it's domestic noir. 
It deals with the destruction of one home by a failed father, a long,
perilous journey in search of a new home, and the threat to that new
home by a demonic shadow father.  Its expressionistic visual style
harks back to the silent era, to the UFA style, and has little in
common with the harsh, jagged, tabloid-style photography of classic noir.

[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . . Clash By Night is included in the Warner DVD noir series . . . noir expert Eddie Muller considers Sunset Boulevard one of the greatest of all noirs . . . Leave Her To Heaven, Shadow Of A Doubt and Double Indemnity are included in Nicholas Christopher's noir filmography in his book Somewhere In the Night and appear on many other lists of films noirs . . . the Wikipedia entry on the subject identifies The Night Of the Hunter as a classic-era film noir . . . the Internet Movie Database, as well as the VCI DVD, call Blonde Ice a film noir . . . Scarlet Street is included in Kino's second box set of films noirs . . . Daisy Kenyon is part of Fox's DVD noir series.]

Read more about Mexico and film noir here.

This film has to rank with Erich Von Stroheim's Blind Husbands and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of American cinema.  It's one of the greatest of all films noirs yet also a film that looks forward beyond noir to the various traditions that would supplant it.

Noir historian Eddie Muller, among others, has pointed out that the Granger and O'Donnell characters in They Live By Night
are in some sense models for the Dean and Wood characters in Nicholas Ray's later Rebel Without A Cause — that in his first film Ray was starting to invent the idea of the 50s movie teenager.  The Granger and O'Donnell characters are not, in fact, teenagers, but they are as innocent and bewildered as teenagers
— and their “rebellion” is just as unconscious, as instinctive, as the
rebellion in the great teen dramas of the 50s, best exemplified in
Rebel Without A Cause.

In 1947, when Ray made They Live By Night, the noir crime
thriller was the only kind of film that allowed a Hollywood director to
deal explicitly with the kind of alienation and despair that Ray
clearly saw as major elements of post-war American life.  By the
time he made Rebel Without A Cause,
in 1955, he realized that he could deal with these elements in the context of
ordinary American middle-class life.  That in itself was a sign
that film noir was coming to the end of its usefulness as a form — filmmakers could explore the noir sensibility anywhere, and deal with its nature and causes more directly.

Murder, My Sweet


The Lady In the Lake


I Wake Up Screaming


Laura


The Big Sleep


Behind Closed Doors


The Mask Of the Dragon


Vicki

They all have noirish elements, and often look like films noirs, but they belong to an older tradition, one in which atomic-age angst and despair ultimately have no place.

[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . .
Murder, My Sweet and The Lady In the Lake are included in the Warner noir DVD series . . . 
I Wake Up Screaming and Vicki are included in the Fox noir DVD series . . . The Big Sleep and Laura are included on almost all lists of films noirs . . . Behind Closed Doors is included in Kino's film noir DVD box set . . . and The Mask Of the Dragon is included in the VCI Forgotten Noir DVD series.]

I think you can call Crime Wave a true noir.  Trapped is so schizophrenic that it's simply unclassifiable.

I've added the film to my own personal canon of genuine films noirs, and added another film in the set, Mystery Street, to the noirish but not really noir category of police procedurals.

The films below are sometimes called films noirs but they make up such a distinct category that they're almost always qualified with the the sub-label docu-noirs:




House On 92nd Street


The Racket


Call Northside 777


Panic In the Streets


Border Incident


The Narrow Margin
Mystery Street



Naked City


Arson, Inc.


Loan Shark


Fingerprints Don't Lie


F. B. I. Girl


Portland Expose
A Bullet For Joey




In fact they're
all police or government-agency procedurals (or, in one case, a newspaper procedural.)  They usually feature some
highly positive documentary-type footage about the law enforcement
group involved and are sometimes shot within the
facilities of the institutions they depict.  (The newspaper procedural, Call Northside 777,
about a crusading journalist who saves an innocent man from prison, was
based on a real case and shot on some of the locations where the original incidents occurred.)

[The noir credentials of the films above are as follows . . .
House On 92nd Street, Call Northside 777 and Panic In the Streets are part of the Fox film noir DVD series . . . The Racket,
Border Incident, Mystery Street and The Narrow Margin are part of the Warner film noir DVD series . . . A Bullet For Joey is part of the MGM film noir DVD series . . . Naked City is found on almost all lists of films noirs . . . the rest are included in the VCI Forgotten Noir DVD series.]

It's hard for me to imagine why anyone would find it useful to call any of the films listed below films noirs, but people have:



Contraband
Casablanca
To Have and Have Not
Notorious


Macao


I'll Get You


The Man From Cairo
They Were So Young
Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report)



These are all
thrillers involving romance and international intrigue, where the occasional
disorientation and jeopardy of the protagonists results from being
embroiled in a foreign locale, fighting a foreign system.  The
whole crux of the film noir
tradition is that the disorientation and jeopardy take place on
familiar soil, within familiar systems that have somehow grown alien, bewildering
and malevolent.  Night and the City is by contrast a true film noir, even though it happens to be set in London. 
It unfolds in a world its American protagonist knows well (though perhaps not
well enough) — his jeopardy and his doom have nothing to do with the
fact that his surroundings are foreign.

I guess Macao gets labeled a film noir because it stars film noir icon Robert Mitchum and was made right after His Kind Of Woman, which also paired him with Jane Russell and which is an actual film noir,
or at the very least a comic parody of one.  The rest are mostly
standard spy thrillers involving an innocent American caught in a web
of foreign intrigue.

[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . . Contraband is included in a film noir DVD box set from Kino . . . Casablanca, Notorious and To Have and Have Not are listed on the Wikipedia “expanded list” of classic films noirs . . . Macao is among the films noirs listed in Nicholas Christopher's Somewhere In the Night . . .  I'll Get You, The Man From Cairo and They Were So Young are included in the VCI series Forgotten Noir.]

Below is another list of films that are sometimes identified as films noirs but that, in my opinion, really aren't:




Whirlpool


The Big Clock


House On Telegraph Hill


The Blue Gardenia


Shock


Sudden Fear


Shadow Man
The Stranger




These are all in fact what have come to be known as Hitchcockian
suspense thrillers, because Hitchcock remains the undisputed master of
the form.  In these films, ideally at least, the viewer is seduced
into a strong identification with the protagonist, a damsel in
distress or a man wrongfully accused of a crime, and shares the
psychological suspense of his or her ordeal, which includes feelings of
guilt that may not be rational and are in any case disproportionate to
the jeopardy involved.



I think they're distinguishable from the true film noir because
they concentrate on the often aberrant psychology of an
individual and don't reflect a sense of society as a whole, or
existence itself, as deranged.  They chart passages through a
moral/psychological disorientation that is more or less resolved by the
end of the film.  The jeopardized innocents of this
tradition are often women, which also distinguishes it from the
tradition of the
classic film noir, which tends to center on male anxieties.  These films involve an exploration of moral guilt, while classic films noirs involve an exploration of existential bewilderment and incompetence, almost always from a male point of view.



All of the films listed above fall far short of Hitchcock's best work
in the form, primarily because they fail to make us full psychological
participants in the jeopardy of their protagonists.  Their
narratives may be purely Hitchcockian, beat for beat, but their
technique doesn't compel us into a deep and often unconscious identification with
their central characters.

Ben Hecht, who wrote the script for Hitchcock's Notorious, also wrote Whirlpool
for Otto Preminger.  The latter has all the ingredients of a
classic Hitchcockian thriller — so it's highly instructive to study
why it isn't one.  It all comes down to Hitchcock's genius in
constructing identification with the protagonist, an identification
that can contradict our conscious disapproval of the protagonist's
behavior.  Preminger made one of the best of all noirs, Angel Face, but on the evidence of Whirlpool he had no gift for, and apparently no great interest in, the Hitchcockian suspense thriller.



[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows — Sudden Fear is included in Kino's film noir box set The Dark Side Of Hollywood . . . Whirlpool, The House On Telegraph Hill and Shock are part of Fox's film noir series . . . Shadow Man is included in VCI's Forgotten Noir series . . . The Stranger is part of MGM's DVD noir series . . .The Big Clock is part of Universal's noir series . . . and the packaging of the Image DVD release of The Blue Gardenia identifies it as “classic noir  with a feminine twist.”  I don't see any point in calling any of these films noirs unless you're willing to call almost all of Hitchcock's American films noirs — which I think stretches the definition of noir beyond the point of usefulness.]