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

The visiting French philosophers agreed that American soil was not fertile for existential thought. Americans were not alienated, had no pessimism about human nature, and lacked the necessary anguish about the problems of human existence. As is often the case, these intellectuals overlooked certain segments of the population that potentially were most anxious, alienated, and pessimistic. American noir was first written for and by members of the working class, and this portion of the public was evidently receptive to its existential content.

Noir is generally recognized as film noir, the retrospective title given to a cycle of crime films made in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s. The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958) are usually considered the first and last films of the cycle.³ The French title literally means black film, and French writer Nino Frank is often credited with coining the term because of the resemblance to the Serie Noire crime novels popular in France at the time. These black and white films are remarkable for their distinctively dark visual style, disorienting camera angles, convoluted narratives, morally ambiguous characters, and bleak outlook on life. The film noir cycle, though popular with general audiences, received scant attention from academics in the United States until the growth of film studies programs in the 1970s.⁴ Since then, a virtual cottage industry has developed around these films.

Though existential themes are sometimes attributed to certain noir titles, these comments are typically only stray remarks that fail to explore and analyze the existential content of these films and their literary source material. As if to justify scholarly examination of Hollywood crime movies, attempts were made to provide film noir with a respectable pedigree, and it should come as no surprise that the artistic merit was attributed to German (expressionism), French (poetic realism), and Italian (neorealism) influences. So film noir is often described as though it were a European phenomenon that astonishingly occurred on American soil.

Since film noir appeared during the 1940s, film scholars use developments during that decade to explain the emergence of the cycle. By the 1940s, many German-trained professionals were employed in Hollywood.