This inclusiveness is abetted by studio home video departments, which will designate any film with the above attributes a film noir because the label is sexy and apparently helps sell DVDs.

In the process, the term gets so vague as to be useless.  I would
argue that there is a core set of films that are truly and uniquely noir,
reflecting a particular time in America, with a particular mind-set, a
mood of existential dread that seemed to invade the American psyche
after the end of WWII, at the beginning of the atomic age.



This sense of dread was in the air before then, of course, as the world
hurtled towards war.  It can be felt very clearly in some dark
films made during the war — in Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt, in Wilder's Double Indemnity, in Huston's The Maltese Falcon.  The first two of those films, along with Leave Her To Heaven, fall into a distinct category of their own — the domestic noir.

The Maltese Falcon seems on its surface to belong to another distinct category, the hardboiled detective thriller, which had noirish
elements but whose essentially noble protagonist rescued it from
existential dread.  Yet Bogart's Sam Spade seems to be losing
faith in the nobility of his code, to see it as meaningless, and I
think that fact alone allows one to call The Maltese Falcon a true film noir.  Just compare Bogart's Spade to his Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, which plays like a hardboiled romantic comedy by comparison with Huston's film.



The point about The Maltese Falcon can be argued, of course, and I place it among the true films noirs with that reservation in mind.  Here are some of the other films I think of as truly noir, without such reservations:



Out Of the Past
The Killers



His Kind Of Woman


The Dark Corner


The Set-Up


Gun Crazy


Fallen Angel


Angel Face


Touch Of Evil


Detour


The Wrong Man


Criss Cross
The Killing



In A Lonely Place


On Dangerous Ground


Crossfire


Where the Sidewalk Ends


Brute Force
The Sweet Smell Of Success
Night and the City
Thieves Highway
The Lady From Shanghai
14 Hours
The Long Night
Nightmare Alley

Odds Against Tomorrow
Act Of Violence
Crime Wave

They Live By Night
Decoy
The Big Steal
Side Street
Where Danger Lives
Tension
Kansas City Confidential
The Big Combo
Gilda




Note that not all of these films end badly for the protagonist, and not all of them feature femmes fatales — several actually have femmes
that rescue the protagonist, and in one of them the protagonist is
rescued, just as improbably, by Jesus.  But in all of them the
protagonist needs rescuing, in all of them he's lost in a nightmare world that's
existentially different from the world that existed before WWII and he can't, by his own efforts, get out of it. 
Even a film like His Kind Of Woman, which goofs comically on this world, is also recognizing it.

In future posts I'll list some of the films commonly called noir
which I don't think really are, because, though they may reflect to one
degree or another the same existential dread as the true noir,
they don't acknowledge it as a profound and inescapable condition. 
It's almost a spiritual distinction, and therefore hard to
define precisely, but I think it's one worth making.

Chinatown is one of the few neo-noirs that really lives up to the designation.  Its view of the world is truly bleak — a moral maze from which there is no escape.  As with many films noirs there’s an indictment of the political system but also a sense that corruption
is universal, not limited to any one class.  It’s an existential corruption.

The big difference between Chinatown and the classic post-WWII noirs is one of gender perspective.  The post-war noirs were centrally concerned with male anxieties, with the way the world looked from the point of view of a suddenly inauthentic and insecure
manhood.  In them, a man might be ruined by a powerful female, a traditional femme fatale, or he might be saved by good woman, but in both cases the situation was beyond his control.  Chinatown finally took a look through the other end of the telescope, imagining what the general collapse of manhood might mean for women.

As screenwriter Robert Towne has said, Evelyn Mulwray is the only
character in the film who operates out of purely decent motives, trying
to rescue herself and her daughter from the clutches of a rancid,
decayed patriarchy.  The protagonist of the film, private eye
Jake Gittes, is a decent enough fellow but impotent when it comes to
helping, much less saving, her.

We’re not quite dealing with a feminist perspective here — we’re still
looking at the mess from a male viewpoint, assessing the male’s failure
of responsibility rather than exploring the female’s search for empowerment —
but we’re a long way from the phallocentric cry of male bewilderment and pain that
was at the heart of film noir.

Still, the deconstruction of the traditional femme fatale
is very thorough and deliberate, because Evelyn Mulwray is first
presented as a kind of spider woman, with all the generic clues that
used to alert us to the fact that the woman in question was going to be
trouble . . . and that’s how Gittes constructs her.  The big
switcheroo is that Evelyn is in much more trouble than she has the
capacity to cause anyone else, that it’s her father’s fault and that
Gittes isn’t smart enough or strong enough to deliver her from it.

Towne’s conversation with the noir tradition is very elegant and profound.  He goes back, in the film, to 1937, to the hardboiled detective fiction out of which film noir mutated, and deconstructs the “tarnished knight” of that form, locating in him the existential nullity of the film noir protagonist.  Gittes has Phillip Marlowe’s private code of nobility, his commitment to a kind of rough justice, but it’s not enough anymore.  The only real nobility he has left is his ability to recognize the cost of his own impotence.

When his associate speaks the film’s famous last line to him, “Forget
it, Jake — it’s Chinatown,” we know he won’t, we know he can’t.
He lives there now — and somehow, because of his failure, we all do.

The anxious, existentially befuddled male is at the heart of film noir.
Caught in a trap that’s not always of his own making, but almost always
worse than he deserves, he stumbles around in a maze with no
exit.  Sometimes he’s destroyed by a powerful female, against whom
he has no defenses, sometimes he’s saved by a powerful female operating
out of unaccountable charity.  In either case, the situation is
ultimately out of his control, which on some level makes each type of
female equally threatening.

Some people have located the source of this paradigm for male anxiety in the new economic status women achieved by entering the
workforce in large numbers during WWII, but this is a very superficial
explanation for the mythology of noir.  Eddie Muller, probably the best and certainly the most entertaining commentator on film noir, points out that the good girls of the tradition are almost always working girls, while the femmes fatales are almost always looking to get something for nothing, and certainly not a paycheck for an honest day’s work.

The male anxiety embodied in the tradition clearly derives from a
deeper source — the moral discombobulation of war itself, the
spiritual exhaustion this particular conflict induced, and the
inconceivable fact of the atomic bomb which raised moral issues and
created fears that the human psyche was ill-prepared to engage.

The ravaged psyches of Americans in the aftermath of a “good war”, a good war they won, so vividly explored in film noir, in some ways says more about the nature of all wars than any works of art which dealt with the conflict itself.

We can't see the existential dread that informs film noir as simply a product of Europe, an import, even though, as D'Ambra points out, many of the crucial filmmakers in the noir tradition were refugees from the European catastrophes of
the 30s and 40s.  This view wouldn't explain the extraordinary
popularity of the form with American audiences for almost two
decades.  Film noir must
have reflected anxieties buried deep in the post-war American psyche,
aroused by the sheer horrific spectacle of total war on a global scale
and by the unthinkable reality of the atomic bomb.

Lancaster, after all, is the one who gets to put his arms around
Ava Gardner, for which going to Hell seems a small enough price to pay
— and once you start thinking in those terms, you're already caught up
hopelessly in the maze of the noir's dark city.

American Gothic

In the broadest perspective, film noir belongs in the long tradition of American Gothic fiction, that dark vision crystallized in the tales of Hawthorne and Poe.  A kind of counterbalance or reaction to American optimism, this tradition can have an almost savage quality, as though the decision to explore the shadowy realms of the American psyche has led to a determination to follow that path to its uttermost end, to the absolute limits of nightmare.



D. H. Lawrence saw in this tradition a desire to ritually enact the decay of European culture as a kind of psychic prelude to the birth of a new culture.  Leslie Fiedler saw the darkness at the center of so much American art as the product of a stunted manhood, which embraced despair and death because it could not find its way to maturity.

However the tradition is explained, it must on some level reflect the enduring contradiction between America’s ideals and its actions.  The nation’s founding document, announcing that all men are created equal, was written by a man who owned slaves.  In the gap between a radical, transformative announcement such as this and its author’s actual life, corrosive subconscious anxieties are bound to breed.

The Genre Of the Grotesque

Europe’s own literal effort at self-destruction in WWI, and the anxiety this produced in a nation that both rejected the old world and still looked to it for guidance, led to a curious new genre in American movies, reminiscent of Poe — the genre of the grotesque.

In this genre, grotesque figures, deformed or mutilated, enacted tragic scenarios of revenge against the “normal” world, in a vain attempt to assert a private nobility, a private honor.  This genre made a star of Lon Chaney, who specialized in tragic grotesques, and is often read as a precursor to the horror film of the 30s, but it was really something else — a way of dealing with the images of death and disfigurement associated with the Great War, a way of expressing the fear that civilization had been deformed by the conflict.  Audiences of the 20s could not help but have associated Chaney’s misshapen characters with the mutilated veterans of the battles in France.

This genre died out with the coming of sound, mutated into the campy Grand Guignol of the classic horror film, but it’s worth noting it here because it represents the same sort of coded response to WWI that the film noir represents to WWII — a way of nursing wounds that nominal “victory” had not healed.

Crime Drama

The underworld crime drama of the 30s was a response to the Depression and to all the social ills it spawned and exposed.  It allowed us to enter the underworld of American society — to revel in the destructive rebellion of underworld thugs, expressing a rage against the system felt by many, while still containing them within a conscious code of values which demanded their death, which still posited forces of order and decency which would prevail in the end.

Hardboiled Detective Fiction

A variant on the crime drama was the pulp detective fiction of the 30s and 40s which sent a knight errant into the dark streets, the moral chaos of American life, in search of truth and rough justice.  Such fiction most often involved a mystery to be solved, and its solution constituted a triumph over the moral chaos.  Pulp detective fiction allowed us to take a brief vacation on the wild side in the company of a guide who was sure to get us home safe again.

Noir

Film noir, as it evolved after 1945, in the wake of a war America participated in fully, sending millions of its young men and women into the fray, and in the wake of the sheer unimaginable fact of the atomic bomb, drew on the traditions of the crime drama and hardboiled detective fiction, but it became something different.

It lost its faith in the forces of order and decency, and in the reliability of its protagonist guides.  It posited a moral maze which had no logical solution, no center and no exit points.  It
offered the frisson of pure existential dread without an easy cure.

Fiedler’s spiritually stunted males became easy prey to strong women — femmes fatales who could destroy a man at will.  (In film noir, a strong woman might just as easily save a collapsed male, but purely as an act of generosity — not because the male deserved saving.)

A protagonist in a true film noir might find himself fated for destruction by a corrupt justice system, by an innocent mistake, by a malevolent coincidence or by some dark inner compulsion which he can’t
control.  In all cases, he finds himself in a labyrinth with a compass that has lost its pointer, a thread that runs out short of escape.

Near Noir

There are many films called noir today which don’t really fit the definition offered above.  They are variants of the 30s crime drama, docu-noirs like The House On 92nd Street, for example, which may borrow the expressionistic visual style of the true noir but ultimately validate the agents of the state who will set things right in the end.  There are also a number of noir-inflected detective mysteries, like Laura, for example, which give us a reliable guide through the moral maze and bring us safely out of it at the end.

This is true even of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, the most noir of the classic detective thrillers.  Sam Spade does the right thing in the end, rejects the femme fatale
and remains true to his essentially decent code.  But he’s more neurotically conflicted about this code than the average hardboiled detective — you get a sense that he’s beginning to suspect it’s all pretty meaningless.  In that existential anxiety we see the roots of the true film noir.

There are, in addition, many films, like Leave Her To Heaven, which explore the existential anxiety of post-WWII America from different perspectives than the true noir.  These films — Double Indemnity is another of them — usually offer sociopathic protagonists whom we find both compelling and repulsive, the attitude we had to the underworld thugs of the 30s crime drama, even though their crimes play out in middle-class homes rather than on the mean streets of a city.

True Noir

In the true noir, we can identify totally with the protagonist — not least in his fated doom, or provisional salvation, in a world that has gone terribly wrong, for reasons that aren’t clear and that it probably wouldn’t help much to understand.

Double Indemnity is generally seen as one of the first (and one of the best) films noirs but I don’t think it fits comfortably into the category.  It shares with the true film noir protagonists who are infected with a moral corruption that destroys them.  Unlike a true film noir, however, the film doesn’t present this corruption as part of a universal human condition, or as the result of a breakdown of humane values in society as a whole.  In the true film noir
the doomed hero is often sped along to destruction by honest mistakes or innocent choices, and just as often is given no course of positive action which would save him.  When he makes bad choices they’re frequently motivated by a position of powerlessness in the social order, particularly economic hardship or unjust persecution by the law.

In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson live comfortable lives.  Their passion and their greed are not presented as responses to any kind of social oppression, unless it’s the sheer boredom of middle-class life.  They’re simply selfish, amoral people.

The film can be read as a critique of middle-class American life, seeing the corruption of the adulterous lovers as a product of the spiritual vacuity of their class, but to me the tone of the film is more peevish and bitchy than political.  You get a sense that Chandler and Wilder, who did the adaptation of Cain’s book, hate their bourgeois characters because they’re stupid and tacky — that it’s snobbery that ignites the engine of the narrative.  Certainly there’s no sympathy involved and no rage directed at the system which produces such people.

Made during WWII, the film taps into the creeping spiritual malaise and suspicion of civilization, as well as the sense of the existential impotence of men, that would inform the postwar film noir — and it portrays one of the most fatal femmes in the entire history of cinema.  But I think these things are mostly the result of coincidence, an intuition about the temper of the times that allowed Chandler and Wilder to indulge what was primarily a personal prejudice against their social and intellectual inferiors.  To them, I think, Walter Neff’s biggest crime wasn’t murder — it was his dumb salesman’s jokes and the self-satisfied way he delivered them.  Phyllis Dietrichson‘s one unforgivable sin was the cheap blonde wig.

I’m talking here about the philosophical mood of the film, the attitude of the creators, but of course those things are transformed in the film itself, whose dark undertow of suspense and fatal miscalculation is so powerful that it transcends the bitchiness of Wilder and Chandler, evoking an anxiety far deeper than the snob’s fear of bad taste.  Double Indemnity, finally, achieves the precise effect of a nightmare, while not venturing into the precise nightmare landscape of the true film noir.

The film, made at RKO, was much meddled with by studio head Howard
Hughes, which may account in part for its disjointed tone.  Ray
disowned the film in later years, saying that Ryan's redemption
involved a miracle and that he didn't believe in miracles.



But the film believes in this particular miracle, and that's all that
counts.  And even the miracle fails to violate entirely the dark
vision of the film noir,
since it presents us with a love that's possible only because both
partners in it are disabled, outsiders, in touch finally with their own
despair because they're able to recognize it in each other.



You could call it a religious film — and you wouldn't be far wrong.

Film noir
is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase to designate any film from the
1940s or 1950s which has moody black-and-white photography, snappy,
cynical dialogue and some sort of crime element in its plot.  In
the process, the term becomes too vague to be really useful.



Gritty underworld crime dramas have been with us since the early silent
era, as has moody expressionistic cinematography, and the private-eye
murder mysteries of the early 40s had plenty of snappy, cynical
dialogue.  But the true film noir
didn't emerge until after WWII and it brought something new to
Hollywood cinema — a comprehensive vision of the modern world as a
dark, hopeless place, morally compromised at its core.



Underworld crime dramas could be dark, but they always imagined forces
of order and decency ready to do battle with and overcome the forces of
chaos and destruction.  The private eye, for all his cynical talk,
had a kind of nobility and honor that he carried with him into the
shadowy realms in pursuit of truth and rough justice.



Traditional crime dramas and police or agency procedurals continued on
into the post-war era, as did murder mysteries, and though they became
inflected with the atmosphere of true films noirs they didn't stake out quite the same territory.

In the post-war noir,
something goes wrong with the whole idea of the red-blooded man, who suddenly
seems inadequate to the task of engaging a corrupt world or matching
the strength of a self-possessed woman.  The world, and desire
itself, come to seem like streets that dead-end in disaster and
oblivion.  Some lines from Two Noble Kinsmen, probably by Shakespeare, who co-wrote the play with John Fletcher, anticipate the realm of the film noir nicely:

This world's a city full of straying streets,

And death's the market-place where each one meets.

Mexico has always had a peculiar place in the popular American imagination.
It has generally tended to represent a kind of mirror world where the
subconscious could emerge into the light — where desire, fear, death, despair, escape from responsibility and propriety could show themselves plainly.

There is chauvinism involved here, of course, a sense of Mexico as a
primitive country, but also an appreciation of the positive genius of Mexican
culture, its sensuality, its frank engagement with death and violence,
with things that the official culture of America prefers to keep hidden
in the shadows.

WWII exposed those hidden things for a generation of Americans and in its wake film noir began a systematic investigation of the shadow world at the fringes
(and somehow also at the heart) of American culture.  In the
process, Mexico took on a new aura.  It became a kind of shimmering
paradise, the locus of an honesty and innocence that no longer seemed
feasible along the mean streets and lost highways of post-WWII America.

So in Out Of the Past, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer live out a doomed idyll in Mexico, on the run from a gangster who has his hooks into both of them.  When they try to carry that idyll north of the border, integrate it into a new life there, they’re both destroyed.

In Border Incident, decent Mexican peasants are exploited and sometimes murdered by powerful American businessmen north of the border who traffic illegally in their labor.  (Border Incident, while it deals with a number of themes from classic film noir, departs from the tradition by positing good-guy government agents as saviors of the peasants, thus violating the cosmic cynicism and skepticism of the true film noir.)

In Gun Crazy, the young couple possessed by a mad love, a love fuelled by irrational violence, are just a few hours away from a safe passage over the border when their crimes catch up with them and send them on a final hopeless flight from retribution and death.

The nuttiest use of Mexico in film noir can be found in what may be the nuttiest of all films noirs, His Kind Of Woman.  The movie starts off fairly traditionally, with Robert Mitchum as a down-on-his-luck gambler who’s hustled into taking a mysterious job south of the border.  As soon as he arrives in Mexico it’s like he’s gone to Oz.  He walks into a dingy cantina about the size of a phone booth and in a back room, about half the size of a phone booth, he finds Jane Russell singing Five Little Miles From San Berdoo accompanied by two Mexican musicians doing cool jazz riffs on guitar and piano.  Things get so nutty after that that the whole noir genre is pretty much deconstructed by the time it’s all over.

As film noir played itself out in the 50s, the image of Mexico in American art shifted back to a more familiar form.  In the Tennessee Williams play The Night Of the Iguana (and in John Huston’s film adaptation of  it), in Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head Of Alfredo Garcia, in Huston’s film of Under the Vocano, Mexico became once more a portal of Hell, where lost American souls went to confront their demons — in an unequal contest which the demons were always fated to win.

In the light of this peculiar history, it’s interesting to look at a recent film, the post-modern film noir The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada.  There another troubled American soul heads south of the border on a quest for a lost paradise — only to discover that the paradise wasn’t really lost because it never really existed.  And it doesn’t matter.  We realize by the end that the quest itself has redeemed and saved him.  The film was written by a Mexican, who knows that Mexico is neither Paradise nor Hell . . . except in the dreams of lost souls on both sides of the line.

[For more thoughts on Mexico and film noir go here.]