Classic film noir is always set on American soil..

Interesting point but I disagree that a film should preferably be set in America to be classified as film noir. Ideally, a noir is a post WWII film which features an existential protagonist struggling in the night time wilderness of a sprawling metropolis. That could be any poor schmuck in any world class city.

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Isn't applying the "film noir" label somewhat arbitrary? Yes, it's an interesting aesthetic analytic exercise. But people seem to discuss such films as tho' there is a gold standard "film noir," a preexisting category, an entity that a given film does or does not measure up to.

I find the films of the original film noir period spontaneous, but latter-day versions rather self-conscious about their noir characteristics.

Dassin made "Night and the City" in London because of his impending blacklisting. Zanuck told him to leave the country to make it, and make it fast; then 20th cut Dassin off. He could not even meet with his editor and composer for post-production. (Dassin gives this information in interviews on the Criterion disk).

So, a lonely film director is hounded out of his country to a strange city where he works among strangers against time by night to complete his (more or less) last native work ... now that's noir!!

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Take that America! Let's not give America credit for anything! Hey, let's debunk that whole "America gave the world Jazz" theory next.

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I don't think that film noir exclusively requires an America setting. It is a genera of American films first characterized and given its name by the French. But does that really make it exclusively American? The London underworld was film noir material and London darkened by post WWII austerity was was literally a noir setting.

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It's funny but I always thought the same thing, that the best crime movies are always American-made. British filmmakers are great with history and satire but not the crime genre so much, so this movie kind of shocked me. I didn't realize until afterward the director was actually American.

But I don't know if Noir has to be set in America to be called Noir. Isn't The Third Man set in Vienna?

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It's pointless to argue the original statement, because there are so many definitions of film noir. There simply is no consensus. A narrow definition would include a dark, gritty, setting (usually, but not always, urban), in which the protagonist finds himself in a situation that is either beyond his control or that soon goes beyond his control. And he is brought down by a femme fatale. This would include such American classics as Double Indemnity; The Postman Always Rings Twice; Out of the Past; Murder, My Sweet; and perhaps also Kiss Me Deadly and Detour.

Others, especially in Europe, tend to broaden the definition to include almost any dark, gritty crime film. My first description, above, is closer to what encyclopedias tend to characterize as film noir. But there are so many definitions that it is impossible to discuss this with any clarity or definitiveness.

Having said that, I think that most of the very best classic film noir examples, by almost any definition, do come from the U.S.

❇ If you can remember the '60s, then you weren't there. ❇

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“Noir is premised on the audience’s need to see failure risked, courted, and sometimes won; the American dream becomes a nightmare, one strangely more seductive and euphoric than the optimism it repudiates… Noir provided losing with a mystique.”

In America it is the anxiety of being a “loser” that underlies male existence more than the experience of war. The male archetype in film noir is an outsider. The great noir novels, The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1945), for example, that were brought to the screen in the 40s, were written before WW2 in the 1930’s, and cannot be understood by reference to post-war trauma. Consider also Out Of The Past (1947) and The Big Heat (1953). In both movies, the male protagonists are clearly outsiders. Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past tries to be rid of his past in a small town but his outsider status is firmly established from the outset before he even appears on the screen, and in The Big Heat, honest cop, Dave Bannion, is not helped by fellow cops in his fight against corruption. These men are outsiders also in the fuller European sense, and it is no coincidence that the directors, Jaccques Tourneur and Fritz Lang, were émigrés from Europe. The Walter Neff character in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), holds down a middle-class job and is respected by his colleagues, but he is a loner. When Neff falls for femme-fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson (played by the great Barbara Stanwyck in THAT wig), he is not only seduced by her allure, but by his loneliness. A man can fatally love a woman he does not quite trust, because he desperately wants to believe otherwise, and fears being alone again more than the fateful consequences of his attachment.

Read more: http://filmsnoir.net/what-is-film-noir/#ixzz3ztvzgyOY

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