Film Noir

Slanted shadows, light striped by venetian blinds, a rainy night. The people making these films in Hollywood didn't know they were making "noir." The name came from across the ocean. Under Nazi occupation, France couldn't screen American films for more than four years. In the summer of 1946, the backlog was released all at once — The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window — and the critic Nino Frank, watching them in a single flood, spotted a dark tone running through what had each looked like a separate detective story, and called it "film noir." The name was born from the rebound of four missed years. The shadows themselves have a backstory too. Lang, Siodmak, Wilder — émigrés who knew the darkness of German Expressionism in their bones — carried that visual language into Hollywood crime pictures. And the film in this band that's easiest to watch today is the poorest one of all. Detour, a low-budget noir shot in six days, was the first film from a B-picture factory studio to be selected for the US National Film Registry (1992), and now that its copyright has lapsed, anyone can watch it in full for free. A film that started outside the system became the most open of the classics.