Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity
(© Universal Studios. All rights reserved.)

American culture hounds owe a debt to the French that stretches back over a century. It's debatable whether Poe or Melville would be as popular as they are today without the backing of our Gallic pals, who saw the brilliance of these now indisputable icons long before we did. The 1930s hard-boiled school of writing--Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Woolrich--likewise benefited; works deemed classics today might have been written off as merely pleasurable pulp were it not for the enthusiasm and determination of the French.

Starting in 1946, French cinemas were flooded with American product that wasn't available during the war. Films like Double Indemnity, This Gun for Hire, and The Killers were among the first of the dark, downbeat thrillers to cross the Atlantic to audiences already steeped in the pleasures of American crime fiction, and thus perhaps eager to see the cinematic extension of the style.
 

Film noir was recognized and named during the form's heyday in the 1940s when critic Nino Frank talked about "dark film" in a 1946 article on Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon. In 1955, still long before American viewers and critics had caught on, Borde and Chaumeton published Panorama du Film Noir Americáin, an entire book devoted to the phenomenon. The phrase itself was fittingly French, derived from a popular group of crime novels known collectively as "Serie Noire," some of them translated works by American writers.

Borde and Chaumeton fulfilled the promise of commentators like Frank in isolating the artistic components of the style and cataloging its creators. By 1955, they could look back at what was clearly the golden age of noir, giving the outlines of the characters--femme fatale, unstable hero--and the mise en scene of pervasive darkness, corruption, and chaos that dominate what were once merely mechanistic thrillers. It would take American critics and audiences nearly two decades to catch up with this quintessential American creation.

Gary Morris is the editor and publisher of Bright Lights Film Journal (http://www.brightlightsfilm.com). He writes regularly for the Bay Area Reporter and SF Weekly.