film noir

The French critic Nino Frank coined the phrase "film noir" in 1946, writing in L'Écran français about a run of American crime pictures Paris was only now catching up on after the war. Hollywood had spent a decade under the Hays Code, which allowed no bedroom scenes and no murder that went unpunished onscreen, so directors learned to put both in shadow instead of showing them and let the story do the punishing. Double Indemnity takes the code at its word: a housewife talks an insurance salesman into killing her husband for the policy, a plan built to fail from its first sentence because the code required it to. Sunset Boulevard runs the same trade through show business instead of an insurance office, a screenwriter with no prospects taking a job with a silent star the public forgot, wages paid in exactly the ruin the code demanded of anyone chasing an easy score. Wilder and Lang had each fled Hitler for Hollywood in the 1930s and brought German Expressionism's shadow-work with them, shooting cheap in high contrast alongside John Huston and Michael Curtiz between about 1940 and 1960. Out of the Past gives a gas station owner a quiet life and one visitor from before, and you know in the first reel that the man will lose, and watch him arrange it himself.

Distinguish from Neo-Noir applies noir's visual and thematic grammar to post-1960s settings, often in color and with self-conscious genre awareness. German Expressionism provided noir's visual vocabulary but operated in a different narrative tradition — fairy tales, myths, and social allegory rather than crime and detection.