The endurance of film noir.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

There was a time not too long ago when film noir (literally, "dark film") was an arcane term found in cinema studies textbooks. To use it in front of a lay audience meant risking a sneer. The expression was one of those snooty French ideas that intellectuals refused to translate into plain English. Today, MGM/UA, Warners, and other home video outlets release "film noir classics" to a public apparently not displeased anymore to be confronted with highbrow French terminology. More important, film noir more or less has entered the popular lexicon of the reasonably educated moviegoer. TV commercials make all sorts of noir allusions, and the term itself is a journalistic descriptive adjective. Film noir endures not only as a style and a genre (it is both) from yesteryear, but continues to influence contemporary moviemaking.

Film noir generally is recognized to be a certain style that influenced primarily the crime movies of the 1940s and 1950s. These black-and-white motion pictures--with their high-contrast shadows, lonely protagonists on empty and foreboding city streets, off-kilter camera angles, and often psychopathic personalities--were seen as characteristic of World War II and postwar anxieties. The examples are plentiful: "The Big Sleep," "In a Lonely Place," "The Big Heat," "White Heat," "Kiss of Death," "Double Indemnity," and "Kiss Me Deadly" are just a few of the more outstanding examples.

Many expatriate German artists such as Fritz Lang helped craft the film noir style. They brought with them the influence of the Expressionist school of art that flourished in post-World War I Weimar Germany before the Nazi takeover. This artistic style, like its noir heir, was characterized by odd camera angles, pervasive paranoia, shadowy nightmare landscapes, and hopelessly lost heroes. German silent movies like "The Student of Prague," "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Metropolis," and "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse" show the origins of the noir sensibility.

Many students of film noir argue that, just as the Weimar cinema evidenced a feeling of impending doom with its strange stylistics and forlorn protagonists, film noir reflected America's anxieties after the Depression and World War II. Although the U.S. was ascendant in the postwar years, the nuclear age, McCarthyism, and the Cold War gave rise, critics argue, to an anxious undercurrent in the body politic that made film noir popular. Although noir is associated chiefly with the crime film, its...