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The 1930s and 1940s were notable for the pressure censors exerted on the studios, which were strongly discouraged from displaying overtly sexual, excessively violent, or anti-American attitudes. Film noir offers a gutter’s eye view of America; the nightmare version of the American Dream from the perspective of marginalized working-class men. Those who consider film noir a phenomenon that begins in the 1940s have had a difficult time explaining how Hollywood was suddenly able to exhibit this cycle of films that challenged the production code and depicted the American system and its values as saturated with corruption.
The frequently offered explanation is that the victorious Americans were suffering from their own psychological war wounds during the 1940s. In his seminal essay, “Notes on Film Noir,” Paul Schrader contends that Americans experienced their own postwar disillusionment. The “acute downer” was a “delayed reaction to the Thirties,” he writes (55). According to Schrader, during the 1930s movie content was deliberately upbeat to provide relief from the Depression and divert attention away from the development of war in Europe. Schrader remarks that after the war, the “disillusionment many solders, small businessmen, and housewife-factory employees felt in returning to a peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the sordidness of the urban crime film” (55). After the war, every film-producing country experienced a period of realism in cinema, Schrader notes, and American audiences wanted “a more honest and harsh view of America,” that reflected the reality they experienced (55).
Of course, this explanation does not square with the consensus view that during these same 1940s Americans were not receptive to the call of pessimistic existentialism. And the contention that the wartime experience gave Americans a jolt of reality that they now expected in their films does not explain the popularity of the prewar and wartime hard-boiled fiction that served as film noir source material. During the very decade that movies were required to be cheerful, hard-boiled fiction writers were producing pessimism that sold very well. Schrader calls the “acute downer” of the 1940s a delayed reaction to the Depression of the 1930s, but hard-boiled fiction actually begins during the 1920s.