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

American films after the Nazi occupation, Nino Frank, having just seen the four crime
thrillers mentioned above, intuitively apprehended that they constituted “a new type of
crime film”. In comparasion with the older detective films which focused more on plot
twists and the unveiling of the killer, Frank realised that with these films, “the essential
quality is no longer “who-done-it?” but how does this protagonist act?” (in Silver & Ursini
1999b:16). Frank estimated then these noir films caused the traditional detective film to be
outmoded, with its stereotypical protagonist “nothing more than a thinking machine”.
Recapitulating, therefore, Part II, “The Cinematic and Social Background to Film
Noir”, comprises two sections, respectively entitled “Cultural and Literary Influences on
Film Noir” and “Social and Political Influences on Film Noir”, functioning on the whole as
an explanatory background to the noir experience, in which I subject some of the most
pertinent of these sources to critical scrutiny. The various cultural, historical, social and
political influences on this movement are sought out, and an attempt is made to bring the
elements of this chain together in order to present film noir both as a dynamic and
developing cultural phenomenon, and also as a disputable discursive construction.
I start by reviewing one of the immediate sources of film noir: the American hardboiled
detective novel – produced by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond
Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich. This type of fiction was not particularly
attractive to Hollywood during the thirties due to its hardened treatment of sex and
violence, which posed a problem in the context of representational restrictions under the
Production Code. The work of these American hard-boiled writers, distinguished for their
use of cynical, austere and hard-bitten language, was recurrently used later as the basis for
noir productions. As Borde and Chaumeton asserted, hard-boiled fiction constituted the
fundamental and immediate influence on film noir’s subject matter and characterisation. In
fact, many of the elements that formed film noir in the forties were developed a decade or
more earlier in this type of fiction that reached the American public through pulp
magazines. Yet, Hollywood took a while to be able to project these films (delayed until the
forties), and most of them, due to censorship impositions, had to be readapted into a more
undemonstrative and less aggressive manner. I will present, as succinctly as possible, the
noir productions that were adapted from the novels of these hard-boiled writers, explaining
what major contributions they brought to film noir in general.
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