Paul Schrader’s 1971 essay “Notes on Film Noir” in all its sappy, naive glory, with typos by me.
In 1946, French critics, seeing the American films they had missed during the war, noticed the new mood of cynicism, pessimism and darkness which had crept into the American cinema. The darkening stain was most evident in routine crime thrillers, but was also apparent in prestigious melodramas.
The French cineastes soon realized they had seen only the tip of the iceberg: As the years went by, Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupt, themes more fatalistic and the tone more hopeless. By 1949, American movies were in the throes of their deepest and most creative funk. Never before had films dared to take such a harsh, uncomplimentary look at American life, and they would not dare to do so again for twenty years.
Hollywood’s film noir has recently become the subject of renewed interest among moviegoers and critics. The fascination film noir holds for today’s young filmgoers and film students reflects recent trends in American cinema: American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character, but compared to such relentlessly cynical films noir as “Kiss Me Deadly” or “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” the new self-hate cinema of “Easy Rider” and “Medium Cool” seems naive and romantic. As the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late forties increasingly attractive. The forties may be to the seventies what the thirties were to the sixties.
Film noir is equally interesting to critics. It offers writers a cache of excellent , little-known films (film noir is oddly both one of Hollywood’s best periods and least known), and gives auteur-weary critics an opportunity to apply themselves to the newer questions of classification and transdirectorial style. After all, what is film noir?
Film noir is not a genre (as Raymond Durgnat has helpfully pointed out over the objections of Higham and Greenberg’s “Hollywood in the Forties”). It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film “noir” as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.
Film noir is also a specific period of film history, like German Expressionism or the French New Wave. In general, film noir refers to those Hollywood films of the forties and early fifties which portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption.
Film noir is an extremely unwieldy period. It harks back to many previous periods: Warners’ thirties gangster films, the French “poetic realism” of Carne and Duvivier, Sternbergian melodrama and farthest back, German Expressionist crime films (Lang’s Maubse cycle). Film noir can stretch at its outer limits from the “Maltese Falcon” (1941) to “Touch of Evil” (1958) and most every dramatic Hollywood film from 1941 to 1953 contains some noir elements. There are also foreign offshoots of film noirs such as “The Third Man,” “Breathless” and “Le Doulos.”
Almost every critic has his own definition of film noir and personal list of film titles and dates to back it up. Personal and descriptive definitions, however, can get a bit sticky. A film of urban night life is not necessarily a film noir, and a film noir need not necessarily concern crime and corruption. Since film noir is defined by tone rather than genre, it is almost impossible to argue one critic’s descriptive definition against another’s. How many noir elements does it take to make a film noir noir?
Rather than haggle definitions, I would rather attempt to reduce film noir to its primary colors (all shades of black) those cultural and stylistic elements to which any definition must return.
At the risk of sounding like Arthur Knight, I would suggest that there were four conditions in Hollywood in the forties which brought about film noir. (The danger of Knight’s “Liveliest Art” method is that it makes film history less a matter of structural analysis and more a case of artistic and social forces magically interacting and coalescing). Each of the following four catalytic elements, however, can define the film noir, the distinctly noir tonality draws from each of these elements.
War and postwar disillusionment: The acute downer which hit the U.S. after the Second World War was, in fact, a delayed reaction to the thirties. All through the Depression, movies were needed to keep people’s spirits up, and for the most part, they did. The crime films of this period were Horatio Algerish and socially conscious. Toward the end of the thirties, a darker crime film began to appear (“You Only Live Once,” “The Roaring Twenties” and, were it not for the War, film noir would have been at full steam by the early forties.
The need to produce Allied propaganda abroad and promote patriotism at home blunted the fledgling moves toward a dark cinema and the film noir thrashed about in the studio system, not quite able to come into full prominence. During the War the first uniquely film noir appeared: “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Glass Key,” “This Gun for Hire,” “Laura,” but these films lacked the distinctly noir bite the end of the war would bring.
As soon as the War was over, however, American films became markedly more sardonic—and there was a boom in the crime film. For fifteen years the pressures agains American’s amelioristic cinema had been building up and given the freedom, audiences and artists were not eager to take a less optimistic view of things. The disillusionment many soldiers, small businessmen and housewife/factory employees felt in returning to a peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the sordidness of the urban crime film.
This immediate postwar disillusionment was directly demonstrated in films like “Cornered,” “The Blue Dahlia,” “Dead Reckoning” and “Ride the pink Horse,” in which a serviceman returns from the war to find his sweetheart unfaithful or dead, or his business partner cheating him, or the whole society something less than worth fighting for. The war continues, but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward the American society itself.
Postwar realism: Shortly after the War, every film-producing country had a resurgence of realism. In America, it first took the form of films by such producers as Louise de Rochemont (“House in 92nd Street,” “Call Northside 777”) and Mark Hellinger (“The Killers,” “Brute Force”) and directors like Henry Hathaway and Jules Dassin. “Every scene was filmed on the actual location depicted,” the 1947 de Rocemont-Hjathaway “Kiss of Death” proudly proclaimed. Even after de Rochemont’s particular “March of Time” authenticity fell from vogue, realistic exteriors remained a permanent fixture of film noir.
The realistic movement also suited America’s postwar mood; the public’s desire for a more honest and harsh view of American would not be satisfied by the same studio streets they had been watching for a dozen years. The postwar realistic trend succeeded in beraking film noir away from the domain of the high-class melodrama, placing it where it more properly belonged, in the streets with everyday people. In retrospect, the pre de-Rochemont film noir looks definitely tamer than the postwar realistic films. The studio look of films like “The Big Sleep” and “The Mask of Dimitrios” blunts their sting, making them seem more polite and conventional in contrast to their later, more realistic counterparts.
The German Influence: Hollywood played host to an influx of German expatriates in the twenties and thirties and these filmmakers and technicians had, for the most part, integrated themselves into the American film establishment. Hollywood never experienced the “Germanization” some civic-minded natives feared and there is a danger of overemphasizing the German influence in Hollywood.
But when, in the late forties, Hollywood decided to paint it black, there were no greater masters of chiaroscuro than the Germans. The influence of expressionist lighting has always been just beneath the surface of Hollywood films and it is not surprising in film noir to find it bursting to find a larger number of German and East Europeans working in film noir: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Franz Waxman, Otto Preminger, John Brahm, Anatole Litvak, Karl Fruend, Max Ophuls, John Alton, Douglas Sir, Fred Zinnemann, William Dieterle, Max Steiner, Edgar G. Ulmer, Curtis Bernhardt, Rudolph Mate.
On the surface, the German expressionist influence; with its reliance on artificial studio lighting, seems incompatible with postwar realism, with its harsh unadorned exteriors, but it is the unique quality of film noir that it was able to weld seemingly contradictory elements into a uniform style. The best noir technicians simply made all the world a sound stage, directing unnatural and expressionistic lighting onto realistic settings. In films like “Union Station,” “They Live by Night,” “The Killers” is an uneasy exhilarating combination of realism and expressionism.
Perhaps the greatest master of noir was Hungarian-born John Alton, an expressionist cinematographer who could relight “Times Square” at noon if necessary. No cinematographer better adapted the old expressionist techniques to the new desire for realism and his black and white photography in such gritty film noir as “T-Men,” “Raw Deal,” “I the Jury” “The Big Combo” equals that of such German expressionist masters as Fritz Wagner and Karl Freund.
The Hardboiled tradition: Another stylistic influence waiting in the wings was the hardboiled school of writers. In the thirties, authors such as Ernest Hemginway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and John O’Hara created the “tough,” cynical way of acting and thinking which separated one from the world of everyday emotions — romanticism with a protective shell. The hardboiled writers had their roots in pulp fiction or journalism and their protagonists lived out a narcissistic, defeatist code. The hardboiled her was, in reality, a soft egg compared to his existential counterpart (Camus is said to have based “The Stranger” on McCoy). But he was a good deal tougher than anything American fiction had seen.
When the movies of the forties turned to the American “tough” moral understrata, the hardboiled school was waiting with preset conventions of heroes, minor characters, plots, dialogue and themes. Like the German expatriates, the hardboiled writers had a style made to order for film noir and in turn they influence noir screenwriting as much as the German influence noir cinematography.
The most hardboiled of Hollywood’s writers was Raymond Chandler himself, whose script of “Double Indemnity” (from a James M. Cain story) was the best written and most characteristically noir of the period. “Double Indemnity” was the first film which played film noir for what it essentially was: small-time, unredeemed, unheroic. It made a break from the romantic noir cinema of the later “Mildred Pierce” and “The Big Sleep.”
In its final stages, however, film noir adapted and then bypassed the hardboiled school. Manic, neurotic post-1948 films such as “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” “D.O.A.” “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” “White Heat” and “The Big Heat” are all post-hardboiled; the air in these regions was even too thin for old-time cynics like Chandler].
Stylistics: There is not yet a study of the stylistics of film noir and the task is certainly too large to be attempted here. Like all film movements, film noir drew upon a reservoir of film techniques and given the time one could correlate its techniques, themes and causal elements into a stylistic schema. For the present, however, I’d like to point out some of film noir’s recurring techniques.
- The majority of scenes are lit at night. Gangsters sit in the offices at midday with shades pulled and the lights off. Ceiling lights are hung low and floor lamps are seldom more than five feet high. One always has the suspicion that if the lights were all suddenly flipped on the characters would shriek and shrink from the scene like Count Dracula at sunrise.
- As in German expressionism, oblique and vertical lines are preferred to horizontal. Obliquity adheres to the choreography of the city and is in direct opposition to the horizontal American tradition of Griffith and Ford. Oblique lines tend to splinter a screen, making it restless and unstable. Light enters the dingy rooms of film noir in such odd shapes—jagged trapezoids, obtuse triangles, vertical slits—that one suspects the windows were cut out with a pen knife. No character can speak authoritatively from a space which is being continually cut into ribbons of light. The Anthony Mann/John Alton “T-Men” is the most dramatic but far from the only example of oblique noir choreography.
- The actors and setting are often given equal lighting emphasis. An actor is often hidden in the realistic tableau of the city at night, and more obviously his face is often blocked out by shadow as he speaks. These shadow effects are unlike the famous Warner Brothers lighting of the thirties in which the central character was accentuated by a heavy shadow; in film noir, the central character is likely to be standing in the shadow. When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor it, of course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood. There is nothing the protagonist can do; the city will outlast and negate even his best efforts.
- Compositional tension is preferred to physical action. A typical film noir would rather move the scene cinematographically around the actor than have the actor control the scene by physical action. The beating of Robert Ryan in “The Set-Up,” the gunning down of Farley Granger in “They Live by Night,” the execution of the taxi driver in “The Enforcer” and of Brian Donlevy in “The Big Combo” are all marked by measured pacing, restrained anger and oppressive compositions, and seem much slower to the film noir spirit than the rat-tat-tat and screeching tires of Scarface twenty years before or the violent, expressive actions of Underworld U.S.A. ten years later.
- There seems to be an almost Freudian attachment to water. The empty noir streets are almost always glistening with fresh evening rain (*even in Los Angeles) and the rainfall tends to increase in direct proportion to the drama. Docks and piers are second only to alleyways as the most popular rendezvous points.
- There is a love of romantic narration. In such films as “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Laura,” “Double Indemnity,” “The Lady From Shanghai,” “Out of the Past” and “Sunset Boulevard,” the narration creates a mood of temps perdu. An irretrievable past, a predetermined fate and an all-enveloping hopelessness. In “Out of the Past,” Robert Mitchum relates his history with such pathetic relish that it is obvious there is no hope for any future: one can only take pleasure in reliving a doomed past.
- A complex chronological order is frequently used to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness and lost time. Such films as “The Enforcer,” “The Killers,” “Mildred Pierce,” “The Dark Past,” “Chicago Deadline,” “Out of the Past” and “The Killing” use a convoluted time sequence to immerse the viewer in a time-disoriented but highly styled world. The manipulation of time whether slight or complex, is often used to reinforce a noir principle: the how is always more important than the what.
Themes: Raymond Durgnat has delineated the themes of film noir in an excellent article in the British Cinema magazine (“The Family Tree of Film Noire,” August 1970) and it would be foolish for me to attempt to redo his thorough work in this short space. Durgnat divides film noir into eleven thematic categories and although one might criticize some of his specific groupings, he does cover the whole gamut of noir production (thematically categorizing over 300 films).
In each of Durgnat’s noir themes (whether “Black Widow,” “Killers-on-the-Run,” “doppelgangers”) one finds that the upwardly mobile forces of the thirties have halted, frontierism has turned to paranoia and claustrophobia. The small-time gangster has now made it big and sits in the mayor’s chair, the private eye has quit the police force in disgust and the young heroine, sick of going along for the ride, is taking others for a ride.
Durgnat, however, does not touch upon what is perhaps the overriding noir theme: a passion for the past and present but also a fear of the future. The noir hero dreads to look ahead but instead tries to survive by the day and if unsuccessful at that he retreats to the past. Thus film noir’s techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity, then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness. Chandler described this fundamental noir theme when he described his own fictional world: “It is not a very fragrant world but it is the world you live in and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting patterns out of it.”
Film noir can be subdivided into three broad phases. The first, the wartime period 1941-46 approximately, was the phase of the private eye and lone wolf, of Chandler, Hammett and Greene, of Bogart and Bacall, Ladd and Lake, classy directors like Curtiz and Garnett, studio sets and in general more talk than action. The studio look of this period was reflected in such pictures as “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca,” “Gaslight,” “This Gun for Hire,” “The Lodger,” “The Woman in the Window,” “Mildred Pierce,” “Spellbound,” “The Big Sleep,” “Laura,” “The Lost Weekend,” “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.” “To Have and Have Not,” “Fallen Angel,” “Gilda,” “Murder My Sweet,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Dark Waters,” “Scarlet Street,” “So Dark the Night,” “The Glass Key,” “The Mask of Dimitrios” and “The Dark Mirror.”
The Wilder/ Chandler “Double Indemnity” provided a bridge to the postwar phase of film noir. The unflinching noir vision of “Double Indemnity” came as a shock in 1944 and the film was almost blocked by the combined efforts of Paramount, the Hays office and star Fred MacMurray [That sounds like total bullshit to me, LRH]. Three years later, however, “Double Indemnities” were dropping off the studio assembly line.
The second phase was the postwar realistic period from 1945-49 (the dates overlap and so do the films; these are all approximate phases for which there are many exceptions). These films tended more toward the problems of crime in the streets, political corruption and police routine. Less romantic heroes like Richard Conte, Burt Lancaster and Charles McGraw were more suited to this period, as were proletarian directors like Hathaway, Dassin and Kazan. The realistic urban look of this phase is seen in such films as “The House on 92nd Street,” “The Killers,” “Raw Deal,” “Act of Violence,” “Union Station,” “Kiss of Death,” “Johnny O’Clock,” “Force of Evil,” “Dead Reckoning,” “Ride the Pink Horse,” “Dark Passage,” “Cry of the City,” “The Set-Up,” “T-Men,” “Call Northside 777,” “Brute Force,” “The Big Clock,” “Thieves Highway,” “Ruthless,” “Pitfall,” “Boomerang!” and “The Naked City.”
The third and final phase of film noir from 1949-53, was the period of psychotic action and suicidal impulses,. The noir hero, seemingly under the weight of ten years of despair, started to go bananas. The psychotic killer who in the first period [had] been a subject worthy of study (Olivia de Havilland in “The Dark Mirror”) in the second a fringe threat (Richard Widmark in “Kiss of Death”) now became the active protagonist (James Cagney in “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”). There were no excuses given for the psychopathy in “Gun Crazy”—it was just “crazy.” James Cagney made a neurotic comeback and his instability was matched by that of younger actors like Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin. This was the phase of the “B” noir film, and of psychoanalytically inclined directors like Ray and Walsh. The forces of personal disintegration are reflected in such films as “White Heat,” “Gun Crazy,” “D.O.A.,” “Caught,” “They Live by Night,” “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” “Detective Story,” “In a Lonely Place,” “I the Jury,” “Ace in the Hole,” “Panic in the Streets,” “The Big Heat,” “On Dangerous Ground” and “Sunset Boulevard.”
This third phase is the cream of the film noir period. Some critics may prefer the early “gray” melodramas, others the postwar “street” films, but film noir’s final phase was the most aesthetically and sociologically piercing. After ten years of steadily shedding romantic conventions, the later noir films finally got down to the root causes of the period: the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity and finally psychic stability. The third phase films were painfully self-aware. They seemed to know they stood at the end of a long tradition based on despair and disintegration and did not shy away from the fact. The best and characteristically noir films—“Gun Crazy,” “White Heat,” “Out of the Past,” “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” “D.O.A.,” “They Live by Night” and “The Big Heat”—stand at the end of the period and are the results of self-awareness. The third phase is rife with end of the line noir heroics. “The Big Heat” and “Where the Sidewalk Ends” are the last stops for the urban cop. “Ace in the Hole” for the newspaperman, the Victor Saville-produced Spillane series (“I the Jury,” “The Long Wait,” “Kiss Me Deadly”) for the private eye. Sunset Boulevard for the “Black Widow,” “White Heat” and “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” for the gangster. “D.O.A.” for the John Doe American.
Appropriately, the masterpiece of film noir was a straggler, “Kiss Me Deadly,” produced in 1955. Its time delay gives it a sense of detachment and thoroughgoing seediness—it stands at the end of a long sleazy tradition. The private eye hero, Mike Hammer, undergoes the final stages of degradation. He is a small-time “bedroom dick’ and makes no qualms about it because the world around him isn’t much better. Ralph Meeker, in his best performances, plays Hammer, a midget among dwarfs. Robert Aldrich’s teasing direction carries noir to its sleaziest and most perversely erotic. Hammer overturns the underworld in search of the “great whatsit” and when he finally finds it, it turns out to be—joke of jokes—an exploding atomic bomb. The inhumanity and meaningless of the hero are small matters in a world in which The Bomb has the final say.
By the middle fifties film noir had ground to a halt. There were a few notable stragglers, “Kiss Me Deadly,” the Lewis/Alton “The Big Combo” and film noir’s epitaph, “Touch of Evil,” but for the most part a new style of crime film had become popular.
As the rise of McCarthy and Eisenhower demonstrated, Americans were eager to see a more bourgeois view of themselves. Crime had to move to the suburbs. The criminal put on a gray flannel suit and the footsore cop was replaced by the “mobile unit” careening down the expressway. Any attempt at social criticism had to be cloaked in ludicrous affirmations of the American way of life. Technically, television, with its demand for full lighting and close-ups gradually undercut the German influence and color cinematography, of course, the final blow to the “noir” look.
New directors like Siegel, Fleisher, Karlson and Fuler and TV shows like “Dragnet,” “M-Squad,” “Lineup” and “Highway Patrol” stepped in to create the new crime drama. This transition can be seen in Samuel Fuller’s 1953 “Pickup on South Street,” a film which blends the black look with the Red scare. The waterfront scenes with Richard Widmark and Jean Peters are in the best noir tradition but a later dynamic fight in the subway marks Fuller as a director who would be better suited to the crime school of the middle and late fifties.
Film noir was an immensely creative period—probably the most creative in Hollywood’s history—at least if this creativity is measured not by its peaks but by its medial level of artistry. Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better made film than a randomly selected silent comedy, musical, western and so on [oh what fatuous crap—LRH] (A Joseph H. Lewis “B” film noir is better than Lewis “B” western for example). Take as a whole period, film noir achieved an usually high level of artistry. [and we don’t have to feel guilty for “slumming,” eh? LRH]
Film noir seemed to bring out the best in everyone: directors, cameramen, screenwriters, actors. Again and again, a film noir will make the high point on an artist’s career graph. Some directors, for example, did their best work in film noir (Stuart Heisler, Robert Siodmak, Gordon Douglas, Edward Dmytryk, John Brahm, John Cromwell, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway) other directors began in film noir and it seems to me never regained their original heights (Otto Preminger, Rudoplph Mate, Nichaolas Ray, Robert Wise, Jules Dassin, Richard Fleischer, John Huston, Andrew de Toth and Robert Aldrich) and other directors who made gerat films in other molds also made great film noir (Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, Fritz Lang, Elia Kaza, Howard Hawks, Robert Rossen, Anthony Mann, Joseph Losey, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick). Whether or not one agrees with this particular schema, its message is irrefutable: film noir was good for practically every director’s career (two interesting exceptions to prove the case are King Vidor and Jean Renoir).
Film noir seems to have been a creative relapse for everyone involved. It gave artists a chance to work with previously forbidden themes yet had conventions strong enough to protect the mediocre. Cinematographers were allowed to become highly mannered and actors were sheltered by the cinematographers. It was not until years later that critics were able to distinguish between great directors and great noir directors.
Film noir’s remarkable creativity makes its longtime neglect the more baffling. The French of course, have been students of the period for some time (Borde and Chaumeton’s “Panorama du Film Noir” was published in1955) but American critics until recently have preferred the western, the musical or the gangster film to the film noir. Some of the reasons for this neglect are superficial; others strike to the heart of the noir style. For a long time, film noir, with its emphasis on corruption and despair, was considered an aberration of the American character. The western, with its moral primitivism and the gangster film with its Horatio Alger values, were considered more American than the film noir.
This prejudice was reinforced by the fact that film noir was ideally suited to the low budget “B” film and many of the best noir films were “B” films. This odd sort of economic snobbery still lingers on in some critical circles: high-budget trash that is considered more worthy of attention than low-budget trash and to praise a “B” film is somehow to slight (often intentionally) an “A” film.
There has been a critical revival in the U.S. over the last ten years but film noir lost out on that too. The revival was auteur (director) oriented and film noir wasn’t. Auteur criticism is interested in how directors are different; film noir criticism is concerned with what they have in common.
The fundamental reason for film noir’s neglect, however, is that the fact that it depends more on choreography than sociology and American critics have always been slow on the uptake when it comes to visual style. Like its protagonists, film noir is more interested in style than theme, whereas American critics have been traditionally more interested in theme than style.
American film critics have always been sociologists first and scientists second. Film is important as it relates to large masses, and if a film goes awry it is often because the theme has been somehow “violated” by the style. Film noir operates on opposite principles. The theme is hidden in the style and bogus themes are often haunted (“middle class values are best”) which contradict the style. Although I believe style determines the theme in every film it was easier for sociological critics to discuss the themes of the western and gangster film apart from stylistic analysis than it was to do for film noir.
Not surprisingly it was the gangster film, not the film noir, which was canonized in the Partisan Review in 1948 by Robert Warshow’s famous essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Although Warshow could be an aesthetic as well as a sociological critic, in this case he was interested in the western and gangster film as “popular” art rather than as style. This sociological orientation blinded Warshow as it has many subsequent critics to an aesthetically more important development in the gangster film—film noir.
The irony of this neglect is that in retrospect the gangster films Warshow wrote about are inferior to film noir. The thirties gangster was primarily a reflection of what was happening in the country and Warshow analyzed this. The film noir, although it was also a sociological reflection, went further than the gangster film. Toward the end film noir was engaged in a life and death struggle with the materials it reflected; it tried to make America accept a moral vision of life based on style. That very contradiction—promoting style in a culture which valued themes—forced film noir into artistically invigorating twists and turns. Film noir attacked and interpreted its sociological conditions and by the close of the noir period created a new artistic world which went beyond a simple sociological reflection, a nightmarish world of American mannerism which was far more a creation than a reflection.
Because film noir was first of all a style because it worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically because it was aware of its own identity, it was able to create artistic solutions to sociological problems And for these reasons films like “Kiss Me Deadly” and “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” and “Gun Crazy” can be works of art in a way that gangster films like “Scarface,” “Public Enemy” and “Little Caesar” can never be.
