portrayals were among the most brutal in cinema
history—was equally beloved as a star of happy-go-
lucky musicals.)
Other notable gangster films include Little
Caesar(1931; director: Mervyn LeRoy); The Public
Enemy(1931; director: William A. Wellman); Scar-
face(1932; director: Howard Hawks); White Heat
(1949; director: Raoul Walsh); Touchez pas au grisbi
(1954; director: Jacques Becker); Rififi(1955; direc-
tor: Jules Dassin); Bonnie and Clyde(1967; director:
Arthur Penn); Le Samouraï(1967; director: Jean-
Pierre Melville); Battles without Honor or Humanity
(1973; director: Kinji Fukasaku); Scarface(1983; direc-
tor: Brian De Palma); Once upon a Time in America
(1984; director: Sergio Leone); The Krays(1990; direc-
tor: Peter Medak); Miller’s Crossing(1990; director:
Joel Coen); Reservoir Dogs(1992; director: Quentin
Tarantino); Sonatine(1993; director: Takeshi Kitano);
Road to Perdition(2002; director: Sam Mendes);
City of God(2002; directors: Fernando Meirelles
and Kátia Lund); and Mesrine: Killer Instinctand
Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 (2008; director: Jean-
François Richet).
Film Noir
In the early 1940s, the outlook, tone, and style of
American genre films grew decidedly darker with the
emergence of film noir (from the French for “black
film”), a shift clearly denoted by its name. Not that
movies hadn’t already demonstrated a cynical
streak. The gangster movies that surfaced in the
previous decade featured antiheroes and less-than-
flattering portrayals of our cities and institutions.
World War I, Prohibition, and the Great Depression
began the trend toward more realistic—and, thus,
bleaker—artistic and narrative representations of
the world, as evidenced in the written word of the
time. Pulp-fiction writers like Dashiell Hammett
had been publishing the hard-boiled stories that
formed the foundation of film noir since the early
1930s. In fact, had it not been for the efforts of
Hollywood and the U.S. government during World
War II, film noir might have come along sooner.
Instead, gung-ho war movies were designed to
build support for the war effort, and lighthearted
musicals and comedies were produced to provide
needed distractions from overwhelming world
events. Yet the same war that helped delay the
arrival of film noir also helped give birth to the new
genre by exposing ordinary Americans to the hor-
rors of war. Whether in person or through news-
reels and newspapers, troops and citizens alike
witnessed death camps, battlefield slaughters, the
rise of fascism, and countless other atrocities.
Many of the genre’s greatest directors, including
Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, were
themselves marked by the hardship and persecu-
tion that they experienced before leaving war-torn
Europe for Hollywood. Others, like Samuel Fuller,
fought as American soldiers. The atomic bomb that
ended the war also demonstrated that not even a
nation as seemingly secure as the United States was
safe from its devastating power. The financial boom
that the war effort had generated ended abruptly
as the soldiers returned home to a changed world
of economic uncertainty. Film noir fed off the post-
war disillusionment that followed prolonged expo-
sure to this intimidating new perspective.
In part because many of the early noir movies
were low-budget “B” movies (so called because
they often screened in the second slot of double fea-
tures), the genre was not initially recognized or
respected by most American scholars. Its empha-
sis on corruption and despair was seen as an
unflattering portrayal of the American character. It
was left to French critics—some of whom went on
to make genre films of their own—to recognize
(and name) the genre.
In fact, the American critic Paul Schrader (him-
self a filmmaker who has written and directed noir
films) feels that film noir is not a genre at all. He
claims that “film noir... is not defined, as are the
Western and gangster genres, by conventions of
setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle
qualities of tone and mood.”^4 Regardless of how it
is classified, film noir has continued to flourish
long past the events that provoked its birth, in
part because of a universal attraction to its visual
and narrative style and a lasting affinity for its(^4) Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir” (1972), in Film Noir
Reader,ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Lime-
light, 1996), pp. 53–64.
SIX MAJOR AMERICAN GENRES 93