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

Hollywood feature films but it did not wholly prevent hard-boiled film adaptations, which
showed that film noir was pushing at the limits of what was permissible.
In political terms, disillusionment came from many directions but the first of these
we should consider the war and postwar maladjustment, the subsequent difficult process of
reorientation and readjustments of returning veterans which gave film noir its particular
social context. We should understand that:
The need to produce Allied propaganda abroad and promote patriotism at home
blunted the fledging movies towards a dark cinema, and the film noir thrashed about
in the studio system, not quite able to come into full prominence. During the War the
first uniquely noir films appeared: The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, This Gun for
Hire, Laura, but these films lacked the distinctly noir bite the end of the war would
bring. (in Silver 1996:54)
Thus, in the subsection called “Postwar Readjustment”, I refer to a specific set of
circumstances in the Hollywood production system, establishing a clear distinction
between the pre- and wartime periods, and focussing on how much noir aesthetics evolved
or at least was redefined in stylistic and Expressionistic terms. Films like The Blue Dahlia
(1946) deliberately address wartime veterans’ feelings of isolation after they returned.
About this, Biesen’s observations provide some orientation in regard to the psychological
atmosphere that American society was experiencing at that time:
These early noir films created a psychological atmosphere that in many ways
marked a response to an increasingly realistic and understandable anxiety – about
war, shortages, changing gender roles, and “a world gone mad” – that was distinctive
from the later postwar paranoia about the bomb, the cold war, HUAC, 7 and the
blacklist, which was more intrinsic to late 1940s and 1950s noir pictures. (Biesen
2005:3)
However, it was not only the returning soldiers who were confronted with a
disillusioning reality. The divisions which had been repressed during the ideological
compromises of wartime also contributed to the psychological atmosphere that Schrader
mentions. Moreover, American women entered the labour force in high numbers during the
war, making them economically emancipated and free to live without the help of a man or
the returning veterans. Still on the work side, labour unions had been under strong
pressure, prohibited to strike during the war, and now demanded longed-for benefits. From
7 House Un-American Activities Committee (my footnote).
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