film noir The legacy of film noirfilm genre (French: “dark film”)

During the 1950s film noir continued to deal with the disillusionment of the outsider, often presenting him as a confused member of a repressive society. Nunnally Johnson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) examined a businessman’s attempt to find meaning in his work and home life. Pickup on South Street (1953), directed by Samuel Fuller, attacked postwar American capitalism; its central character is a man who accidentally acquires a top-secret microfilm but will only part with it for a price, no matter how that may jeopardize the safety of his country. Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) went so far as to examine the brooding outsider’s attempt to change his own environment through a murder contract with another outsider. More often, however, the outsider is an inherently noble figure in a futile battle with corruption, as in Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), cited by a plurality of film critics as the final film of the golden age of film noir.

In later years, elements of noir could be found in the work of younger directors influenced by the style, including, in the 1950s and ’60s, members of the French New Wave such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, both of whom had been critics and essayists for Cahiers du Cinema. Beginning in the 1970s, the cinematography and mood of noir were also exhibited by American directors in films such as Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971); Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974); Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973); Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974); Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981); and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).

Filmmakers of the 1980s and ’90s, influenced more by the homages of the 1970s than the actual noir productions of the 1940s and ’50s, often employed elements of film noir in an offbeat context. Ridley Scott’s science-fiction drama Blade Runner (1982) revisited the use of set design to enhance the mood, an idea that can be traced back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Richard Tuggle’s Tightrope (1984) features film noir’s theme of disillusionment in a police officer who discovers he is as much an outsider as the criminal he is pursuing. Perhaps the best contemporary examples of the genre are Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), a bleak story of corrupt cops, and Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), a similarly dark story inspired by the crime novels of James M. Cain. Both films are presented in classic film noir style, the latter in black-and-white.

Despite recognition of the elements common to film noir, most scholars and critics continue to employ their own definitions as to what constitutes the noir style. Nevertheless, the golden era of film noir—the late 1940s through the early ’50s—is regarded as a benchmark period in American filmmaking, as well as a strong cultural checkpoint for the values of postwar America.