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the Decade
FILM
NOIR
In the years immediately following World War II,
French film critics began to identify a new darkness American
films.
In 1946, Nino Frank writing
about a small group of Hollywood movies that had been produced
during the war, but only recently released to European markets
was the first critic to apply the term film noir,
or "black film," to these films.1
This American film noir movement characterized
by deep, moody shadows, violent death, moral uncertainty,
determined women and conflicted male heroes reflected
the darker undercurrents of anxiety found in American society
during the 1940s and on into the 50s.
THE WAR YEARS
The entire decade of the 1940s was marked by conflict and
contradictions.
The decade began on an unsettled note. The devastating domestic
and global economic depression of the 1930s was now overshadowed
by the war raging in Europe. Americans were divided on what
their role should be in the growing conflict. When Pearl Harbor
was attacked on December 7, 1941, the questions were answered,
and America entered World War II. Virtually everyone in American
society became part of a complete and total mobilization effort
focused on winning the war.
America's intense and widespread feelings of patriotism and
national unity against a common enemy were contradicted, however,
by uncertainties about rapidly escalating changes throughout
American society - social, economic, and cultural. Films produced
during the first half of the 1940s began to reflect this dichotomy.
While many movies, such as Sergeant York (1941), Guadalcanal
Diary (1943), and Since You Went Away (1944) expressed
wartime patriotic spirit and faith, a darker and more pessimistic
ambivalence began to appear in Hollywood films, sometimes
in movies not often thought of as classic film noir.
The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Double Indemnity
(1944) were among the films French critic Frank was exploring
when he remarked upon the new noir in American films.
Although not a traditional film noir, Casablanca
(1942) was a romance with patriotic overtones and noir
undertones.
Even so-called patriotic films began
to present a darker view of wartime stresses as the war went
on. In discussing the 1945 film, The Story of G.I. Joe,
Colin Shindler remarks in Hollywood Goes to War that
the heroic film treatment of the fighting man had "yielded
progressively" to the version of the soldier as a "battle-hardened,
weary, disillusioned veteran whose only concern was to stay
alive without deserting his post."2
THE POSTWAR
YEARS
When World War II ended, the contradictions felt by Americans
were greater than ever.
The euphoria of their victory over fascism was tempered by
a growing knowledge of the Holocaust in Germany and the fearsome
power of the atomic bombs their nation had dropped on Japan.
Americans indeed people around the globe found
themselves with a complex mixture of optimism and anxiety
as they faced the hopes and uncertainties of a new, modern
world.
In September 1945, less than a month
after Japan surrendered, The Nation published an essay
by one of Britain's leading younger scientists, J. D. Bernal,
in which he wrote that, "people have been quick to see
how the actuality of the atomic bomb has implicitly changed
the whole existence of man in this universe."3
At home, the excitement of families being reunited with fathers
and sons was often offset by more disruption as family members
found themselves struggling to get to know each other again
after years apart. William Wyler's The Best Years of Our
Lives (1946), although not
a film noir, portrayed many of the adjustments
feared by or facing returning veterans and their families
acceptance of physical disabilities; discouragement
with bad marriages and working wives; frustration of women
who had joined the workforce during the war only to be asked
to give up their job when the war ended; and, disillusionment
with careers that no longer held the same meaning they had
before the life-and-death war years.
These issues of conflict and uncertainty could also be found
indirectly in film noirs such as The Blue Dahlia
(1946), which centered around a returning veteran and the
mysterious murder of his unfaithful wife.
Although there was still tremendous faith in progress and
the American Century that Henry Luce wrote about in 1941,
there was also anxiety about the fragility of progress and
a flawed and dangerous humanity that intensified in the postwar
years.
All of this uncertainty began making its way into American
films throughout the 1940s. Film noir is a unique body
of work that provides insights into the darker side of that
conflicted decade.
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