Film Noir and Hard-boiled Fiction

What is Film Noir and What does it owe to the Hard-Boiled Literary Genre?

The Film Noir is a cinematic term which refers to an era of Hollywood film industry which started in the beginning of 1940s to the end of 1950s. However, its prevalence still exists today. From John Huston's The Maltese Falcon of 1941 to the Coen Brother's The Man Who was not there. Film Noir refer to those crime movies and dramas which had an emphasis on sexual motivations and cynical attitudes. This era has an association with low-key black and white visuals which have its roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Numerous of these films were derive from the hard boiled criminology genre which had commenced in the United States in the era of depression (Emanuel, 45).

The term 'Film Noir,' is French for black film and a French critic named Nino Frank was the first one to relate it to the Hollywood movies in 1946. Film Noir was unknown to the majority of the professional of the film industry in United States. Cinema critics and historians described the Noir trend in retrospect. At the time when film noir cannot adopted by the professionals, the film noirs can be called as melodramas. Film Noirs consist of a variety of movies like The Killers, The Lineup, The Big Sleep, The Big Heat, Gun Crazy, The Set-Up, D.O.A. and Night and the City.

Numerous of the movies, that can be released, from 1960s and onwards, shares the qualities of the classic era of the film noir. It customarily treated conventions of noir in a manner of self-referential. These latter days' works in the mode of noir can be called as neo-noirs. The tropes of film noir have inspired parody since the mid-1940s (Haut, 78).

Film Noir to the Hard-boiled Fiction Tradition

A large number of Classic Noir films are adaptations of hard-boiled novels and short stories. However, even the films that were not straightforward adaptations can be shaped by the literary tradition. Following are some of the elements that Film Noir was relevant from the hard-boiled tradition.

Types of Stories

Film Noir appropriates two major types of crime stories from pulp fiction: the Detective story and the Sympathetic Criminal story (Kemp, 45).

The Detective Story

The two key writers who created and shaped the hard-boiled detective fiction tradition were Dashell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. We'll read two seminal works: The Maltese Falcon (1929), The Big Sleep (1939)--works that created the American Private Eye. All Noir Detective Films from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown, Blade Runner and Devil in a Blue Dress is the utilization by these two pulp fiction writers (O'Brien, 23).

The Sympathetic Criminal Story

The key figure in creating this form of the story was James Cain. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936) are the seminal texts in creating the line of stories told from the criminal's point of view. For example, mostly ordinary people, sometimes from the lower class but more often middle-class respectable men who get caught up in ...