The Social Context of Post-War Noir

Post-war cinema in Hollywood was by and large triumphalistic. Film noir, however, ran in largely the opposite direction. Instead of glorious optimism, noir expressed the ambient uneasiness and fear of the post-war environment where the menace of the Axis powers had been supplanted by Soviet Russia. Disillusionment emerged on domestic issues as well, such as in works like The Blue Dahlia (1946), which depicts the plight of a betrayed WWII veteran. As self-censorship began to move Hollywood away from social content in the early 1950s, film noir remained American cinema's lone contribution of social criticism to popular culture. The Stranger (1946), for example, the story of an American hunting down Nazi fugitives, was the first American film to depict footage of German concentration camps, according to this. Rather than the unbounded heroism and exaltation of the individual that came out of boilerplate westerns and feel-good films of the 1940s, noir presented a sinister, corrupt, and deterministic world where the protagonist is not the hero but the object of some larger, unseen design.

In terms of visual style, noir drew heavily upon the German expressionist style created by directors like Fritz Lang in the 1920s. The two genres shared a remarkable similarity in their content as expressionism emerged to communicate the despair and humilliating misery of post-war Germany.