A Japanese heist, a Bollywood musical, London’s East End – noir has adapted and travelled the world from its 1940s Hollywood beginnings and thanks to a series of festivals and rereleases there are classics to see this autumn
Film noir was first identified at a distance. In 1946, Italian-born French critic Nino Frank coined the term to describe a cycle of coolly cynical crime thrillers produced by Hollywood earlier in that decade, but only recently available in Paris. “These ‘dark’ films, these films noirs, no longer have anything in common with the ordinary run of detective movies,” wrote Frank of films including Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944). But the term still has legs, with films as recent, and as far removed from Hollywood, as the Chinese crime procedural Only the River Flows, which was released this summer, inspiring critics to reach for the word noir.
The first noirs were characterised by their violence, pessimism, ambiguity and the absence of sentiment, as well as the stylistic influence of European silent cinema – all of which made sense as several of the film-makers involved were émigrés, fleeing the rise of fascism. Further tropes emerged as the mode became more familiar: the femme fatale, the flashback, the antihero and his world-weary voiceover. Soon, film noir became instantly recognisable, even when mixed with the musical or the melodrama.
