The first examples – not “pure” – could be “The Public Enemy” (1931) and “City Streets” (1931). By the way, I think the real Makers of the genre are the Germans in the ’20s.
I agree on the germans in the 20’s Like, Pandora’s box or The Last Laugh.
I believe they were 20’s
Yes they were 20s. Karl Fruend’s Mad Love (1935) is often seen as building a bridge between German expressionism and Hollywood, and actually being an influence on the cinematography of noir. (I think it was Freund.)
There is a thread on this site ( you have to go back quite a few pages ) posted by Bobby Wise that has a truck load of info on film noir. It’s one of my favorite genres. I would suggest checking that thread out, there were a lot of replies.
That thread is called Classic Film Noir and is currently on page 25. If you like noir definitely check it out.
the building blocks of film noir are:
- the hard-boiled school of american letters (hemingway, hammett, chandler, woolrich, etc.)
- german expressionist film of the 20s (murnau, lang, etc.)
- french poetic realism of the 30s (carne, renoir, etc.)
- universal horror films of the 30s (browning, whale, etc.)
- warner brothers gangster films of the 30s (“scarface”, “the public enemy”, “little caesar”)
Yeah it was sort of the conjunction of all these European directors emigrating to Hollywood, fleeing the Nazis, and bringing their sensibility, combined with the fact that America had lost a lot of its innocence during the dustbowl, depression, world war II, and was ready for a darker tone in film. A tone that had been there in letters, as Bobby points out (I’d add Nathanael West to that list) for at least ten or fifteen years prior.
MATT
Film Noir has taken a bit from the earliest of cinema, mostly from the early work of Marcel Carne and fritz Lang, primarilly from Poetic-relism, to german expressionism. Film noir has been some of my favortie type of film. movies like: Ullmer’s “Detour” and Lang’s moody darkly romatic version of Scarlet Street (renior version is apparently better, haven’t seen it though).
What are some noirs that you belive may have been the mark for the beggining of this style? Or what are some films or filmakers that have taken from the earliest of cinema to create these dark, unsettling, romatic peices of work.