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American crime movie made during the 1940s–1950s with a story that features a lone protagonist, murder, a somewhat dark world-weary outlook on life, and generally a total disregard and disrespect for the wealthy and powerful.
What Is Film Noir
In the 1940s, while the world was at war in Europe, Hollywood needed to fill theaters. They decided on the idea of selling audiences double features. One of these films would be the big budget feature with famous stars while the other was the B picture – a film made faster and cheaper by the studios, with either actors who were just coming up or actors whose star was fading. The B picture was the “free movie” to get seats filled. Many of these B pictures were film versions of the popular pulp mystery novels as reported in the Hollywood trade paper Variety.
Shortage of story materials and writers now has film companies seriously ogling the pulp mag scripts and scriptors. It...
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References
Chandler, Raymond. 1977. The simple art of murder. New York: Ballantine Books.
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Landau, D. (2023). Heroism in Film Noir. In: Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17125-3_108-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17125-3_108-1
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