outlook. Like the eggs for which they are named,
the hard-boiled characters in film noir have a tough
interior beneath brittle shells. The themes are
fatalistic, the tone cynical. Film noir may not be
defined by setting, but noir films are typically shot
in large urban areas (such as Chicago, New York, or
Los Angeles) and contain gritty, realistic night
exteriors, many of which were filmed on location,
as opposed to the idealized and homogenized
streets built on the studio back lot.
Like his counterpart in the gangster movie,
the film-noir protagonist is an antihero. Unlike his
gangster equivalent, he rarely pursues or achieves
leadership status. On the contrary, the central noir
character is an outsider. If he is a criminal, he’s usu-
ally a lone operator caught up in a doomed attempt
at a big score or a wrongdoer trying to elude jus-
tice. The private detectives at the center of many
noir narratives operate midway between lawful
society and the criminal underworld, with associ-
ates and enemies on both sides of the law. They
may be former police officers who left the force in
either disgrace or disgust; or they may be active
but isolated police officers ostracized for their refusal
to play by the rules. Whatever his profession, the
noir protagonist is small-time, world-weary, aging,
and not classically handsome. He’s self-destructive
and, thus, fallible, often suffering abuse on the way
to a story conclusion that may very well deny him his
goal and will almost certainly leave him unredeemed.
All this is not to say that the noir protagonist is
weak or unattractive. Ironically, the world-weary
and wisecracking noir antihero is responsible for
some of cinema’s most popular and enduring char-
acters. Humphrey Bogart was just a middle-aged
character actor before his portrayal of the private
detective Sam Spade in John Huston’s The Maltese
Falcon(1941) made him a cultural icon.
World War II expanded opportunities for women
on the home front who took over the factory jobs
and other responsibilities from the men who left to
fight in Europe and the Pacific. Perhaps as a reflec-
tion of men’s fear or resentment of these newly
empowered women, film noir elevated the female
character to antagonist status. Instead of passive
supporting players, the femme fatale (French for94 CHAPTER 3TYPES OF MOVIES
Fatalism in film noirFilm-noir movies sometimes
present information and events in a way that heightens the
audience’s sense that the hard-luck protagonist is doomed
from the moment the story opens. Director and screenwriter
Billy Wilder pushed this technique to the extreme in two of
his most famous noir movies, both of which reveal the
demise of the protagonist. The first moments of Double
Indemnity(1944) open with antihero Walter Neff (Fred
MacMurray) stumbling wounded into his office to confess
to the murder he will spend the rest of the story trying to
get away with [1]. Sunset Boulevard(1950) goes one step
further. The entire film is narrated in first-person voice-over
by a protagonist (William Holden) presented in the opening
scene as a floating corpse [2].1 2