Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction By Stephen Fa ...

These immigrants are usually credited with injecting German expressionist techniques into the visual style of Hollywood crime films. A less assertive claim about European influence is made for the narrative style and content of the movies. Though hard-boiled fiction is acknowledged as one source, film noir is often defined as primarily a visual style. This account is useful to advocates of European influence because it de-emphasizes the American source material. To the extent that existentialism is mentioned, the reader is left to assume the European origin, as though any material of intellectual value could only have come from Europe.

Robert G. Porfirio’s refreshing 1976 essay, “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir,” gives the most attention to the relation between film noir and existentialism; his article is one of very few that even mentions such a connection. Porfirio’s effort is especially remarkable because he immediately requests that his use of the term existential not be too closely tied to the specific philosophies of European existentialists. Porfirio agrees, “[E]xistentialism as a philosophical movement was largely unknown in the United States until after World War II, when the French variety was popularized by the writings and personal fame of its two leading exponents, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus” (80). So Porfirio reasons that if film noir contains existential motifs, and these themes were not imported from Europe, they must have developed here in the United States. Porfirio explains, “[S]uch attempts on the part of Hollywood to borrow directly from that European tradition would have been rare indeed, particularly in the 1940s. It is more likely that this existential bias was drawn from a source much nearer at hand—the hard-boiled school of fiction without which quite possibly there would have been no film noir” (82–83).

It was common practice for Hollywood studios to purchase the rights to popular novels and turn them into films, and by the 1940s they had accumulated a stockpile of these crime stories. Porfirio was not concerned to analyze the connection between existentialism and hard-boiled fiction, but that connection is essential to this discussion because hard-boiled fiction is the foundation for the existential content of film noir.