In 1972, Paul Schrader spun an origin story that name-checked a multiplicity of cinematic sources in the U.S. and overseas — German Expressionism, Universal horror, French melodrama, British thrillers — before the varied lineages cross-bred into something distinctly American.
The coinage “film noir” is usually credited to the French critic and screenwriter Nino Frank, who in 1946 derived it from the “black” crime fiction of Marcel Duhamel’s Série noire publishing imprint.
Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton codified the term in their pioneering study A Panorama of American Film Noir, published in 1955.
In the U.S. Film noir was called subversive “murder mellers,” or off-kilter “celluloid dirt,” faced sharp criticism from censors, critics and industry execs: “We cannot send pictures overseas which show Americans as sordid people intent upon low objectives.”
Film noir may have more outlets and play dates now than it did then — in repertory markets, Blu-ray box sets and noir film festivals and TV programming.
Eddie Muller, TCM’s czar of noir, calls film noir “the gateway drug to classical Hollywood cinema.”
So many of the prestige musicals, biopics and social-problems films of the era have flatlined and faded over time, but the tough, hard-bitten noirs never seem to lose their edge.
