Falcon; Double Indemnity; Laura; Murder, My Sweet; andsomewhat surprisingly, in light of the fact that it disappears from most subsequent writings The Lost Weekend. Another picture released in Paris that summer, The Woman in the Window, described by one French reviewer as a 'bourgeois tragedy,' was later to become a noir classic.9 The forthcoming Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer production of The Postman Always Rings Twice was mentioned alongside the initial group of five, and Citizen Kane, which was also mentioned, was placed in a class by itself. Critical discussion centered mainly on the first four thrillerswhich, even though they were not exactly alike (The Maltese Falcon does not have a first-person narrator or flashbacks, and Laura is not based on a hard-boiled novel), seemed to belong together. These films would become the prototypical members of an emergent category, and they would have an unusual influence on French thinking for over a decade.
In one sense the French invented the American film noir, and they did so because local conditions predisposed them to view Hollywood in certain ways. As R. Barton Palmer observes, postwar France possessed a sophisticated film culture, consisting of theaters, journals, and 'cine-clubs' where movies were treated as art rather than as commercial entertainment.10 Equally important, the decade after the liberation was characterized by a strong resurgence of Americanism among French directors and critics, many of whom sought to refashion their art cinema along the more 'authentic' lines of Hollywood genre movies. 11 A nouvelle vague would eventually grow out of this dialectic between America and Europe, and the so-called film noirwhich was visibly indebted to European modernismbecame the most important category in French criticism.
Which of these films was not described as an American film noir by French writers in the summer of 1946: Laura (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), or The Lost Weekend (1945)? Answer on p. 13. (Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive.)
The French were also predisposed to invent American noir because it evoked a golden age of their own cinema. They were quick to observe that the new Hollywood thrillers resembled such Popular Front films as Pepe le Moko (1936), Hotel du Nord (1938), and Le jour se leve (1939)a group of shadowy melodramas, set in an urban criminal milieu and featuring doomed protagonists who behaved with sangfroid under pressure. The term film noir had in fact been employed by French writers of the late 1930s in discussions of these films. Film historian Charles O'Brien points out that in the years immediately before the war, the word noir often had pejorative connotations and was frequently used by the right-wing French press in their attacks on the 'immorality and scandal' of left-wing culture.13 Noir was nevertheless embraced as a descriptive adjective by several writers on the Left (particularly after the war), and the style favored by the Popular Front, whether it was called 'noir' or not, constituted a respectable and quite recognizable type of filmmaking for most critics throughout the world. Thus, when Double Indemnity was released in the United States in 1944, a reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter noted that it was 'more than a little reminiscent of the late lamented, excellent French technique.' (To reassure moviegoers, he added, 'This is not to say that it is 'arty'' [24 August 1944].)
French writers after the war might have recognized the equally significant contributions of other European nations to the evolution of the crime or espionage film. For example, they could have alluded to Alfred Hitchcock's British thrillers of the 1930s andhad they known itto Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich (1940). These were the films with which American reviewers compared the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon; in fact, when Billy Wilder completed Double Indemnity, he told the Los Angeles Times that he intended to 'out-Hitchcock Hitchcock.'14 In 1946, however, the French not only ignored the British but also conspicuously avoided the Germans.15 Instead, the two earliest essays on Hollywood film noirNino Frank's 'Un nouveau genre 'policier': L'aventure criminelle,' published in the socialist L'ecran francais in August 1946, and Jean-Pierre Chartier's 'Les Americains aussi font des films' noirs,'' published three months later in the more conservative Revue du cinema (an ancestor of Cahiers)treated the American pictures as if they were a new phenomenon with only a few Gallic predecessors.
For Nino Frank, it seemed that a young generation of Hollywood auteurs, led by John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Raymond Chandler, had rejected the sentimental humanism of 'museum objects' like John Ford, Frank Capra, and William Wyler.16 The new filmmakers specialized in the policier (police story), which, according to Frank, always deals with the 'social fantastic' and the 'dynamism of violent death' (8); unlike earlier practitioners, however, the Americans were more concerned with 'criminal psychology' and were therefore making 'criminal adventures'' or 'films 'noirs'' (14). Such films were convoluted, harsh, and misogynistic, but they made the characters in most movies seem like 'puppets' (14). Moreover, they often employed a first-person narration and flashbacks that fragmented the story, producing a montage. Frank claimed that Sacha Guitry had been the first to use this technique, in Le roman d'un tricheur (1936), but he wondered whether or not Hollywood had outclassed Paris. Henceforth, the French would need to make 'somber' films in which there was 'more dynamism in an unmoving shot than in a majestic panorama'(14).
Jean-Pierre Chartier also treated the American films as a group, but he disliked their 'pessimism and disgust toward humanity' and suggested that the puritanical Breen Office had deflected the characters' sexual motives into an 'obsessive criminal fatality.' In some respects, his remarks were reminiscent of the conservative reactions to French noir during the avant guerre, except that the Americans seemed to him far more decadent than the French Popular Front had been. Although he admired the first-person narration in Murder, My Sweet (which reminded him of 'the old avant-garde'), Chartier was troubled by the moral effect of the Hollywood series as a whole:
One may speak of a French school of film noir, but Le Quai des brumes or Hotel du Nord have at least accents of rebellion, a fleeting image of love that gives hope for a better world, . . . and if the characters are desperate, they rouse our pity or sympathy. Nothing of that here: these are monsters, criminals whose evils nothing can excuse, whose actions imply that the only source for the fatality of evil is in themselves. (70)
In the United States, most of these films had been nominated for Academy Awards and had attracted a good deal of public and critical attention. Reviewers had seen a vague connection between them, but no one tried to invent a new term.18 The New Yorker described Double Indemnity as a 'murder melodrama' (16 September 1944), and The Los Angeles Times called it an 'intellectual exercise in crime' (10 October 1944). (Times critic Philip K. Scheuer, who admired the Wilder film, added a qualification: 'I am sick of flash-back narration and I can't forgive it here.') Newsweek said that Murder, My Sweet was a ''brass-knuckled thriller' (26 February 1945), and The Hollywood Reporter noted that Paramount was investing heavily in the ' 'hard-boiled, kick-em-in-the-teeth murder cycle' (28 January 1946). The Americans also grouped the films in ways that now seem unusual: The Los Angeles Times compared Double Indemnity with the MGM adaptation of William Saroyan's Human Comedy (6 August 1944), and Manny Farber, writing in The New Republic, compared it with Preston Sturges's Miracle of Morgan's Creek (24 August 1944).
French writers, in contrast, were fascinated with the noir metaphor, and in subsequent discussions they elaborated the tensions between the two essays by Frank and Chartier. Over the next decade, as the category expanded and became the subject of retrospectives and catalogues raisonnes, French critics often followed Frank's line, praising noir for its dynamism, its cruelty, and its irrationality; but they also searched the dark Hollywood
