Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2.3 Postwar Readjustment
If the mood of the postwar era was split between the
celebration of family life and a desperate worry
about imminent nuclear destruction, the Hollywood
films of the period, it is hardly surprising, manifest a
similar mix of optimism and pessimism. (Conrad
2006:112)
One of the reasons we refer to certain films as being classic noirs has to do with the
fact that, not coincidentally, they fall in the period from the moment America got involved
in World War II through to the Eisenhower years. This period of noir – which I have
already identified as beginning with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, in 1941, and
ending with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil in 1958 – is filled with a good number of
productions depicting the readjustment of veterans returning from war to a newly
reconstituted society and to a new civilian life. It is undeniable that like any other extended
conflict, the Second World War left profound scars, with strong psychological effects upon
its combatants. Some were permanently traumatised by their wartime experiences and their
unpredictable violence, instability and aimlessness made them unsuited for civilian life.
Many noir films actually describe the dilemma these maladjusted veterans had to face and
their difficulty at achieving reintegration both professionally and with their families. This
precise sense of alienation merges with a wider sense, strengthened, as seen in the previous
section, by the demented McCarthyism of the fifties, of a society that punishes failure to
conform and suspects those who do not or cannot fit into that society. In “Notes on Film
Noir”, Paul Schrader writes that:
The disillusionment many soldiers, small businesses and housewife / factory
employees felt in returning to a peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the
sordidness of the urban crime film. (…) The war continues, but now the
antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward American society itself. (Schrader
1972:12)
The returning veteran was often a disillusioned man, feeling the shock of
readjustment, but at the same time a sense of marginalisation or exclusion. Back in 1946,
William Wyler launched his self-conscious film The Best Years of Our Lives which is a
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