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

2.4.1.3 Conclusion
The popularity of the private eye as a lead character decreased in film noir of the
fifties. In films such as The Big Combo or Kiss Me Deadly the protagonists might be
detectives and yet they have a more compromised role when compared to the noir hero of
the first and second periods. In the films of this third phase we no longer get the private
eye as a “lone wolf”; instead he is a rather more sociologically laden figure. Moreover, film
noir’s final phase was the most aesthetically extreme, and after ten years of increasingly
finessing romantic conventions, the later noir films showed the roots of the form in sexual
pathology and psychic instability, as I have tried to draw it out in Lewis’s work. These
differences have clearly also to do with the realities of Hollywood production and
consumption during the period 1940-58, along with the new widescreen technologies that
were an attempt to persuade back the family audience. Paul Schrader summarises this idea
by stating that:
As the rise of McCarthy and Eisenhower demonstrated, Americans were eager to
see a more bourgeois view of themselves. Crime had to move to the suburbs. The
criminal put on a grey flannel suit, and the footsore cop was replaced by the
“mobile unit” careening down the expressway. Any attempt to social criticism had
to be cloaked in ludicrous affirmations of the American way of life. Technically,
television, with its demand for full lighting and close-ups, gradually undercut the
German influence, and color cinematography was, of course, the final blow to the
noir look. (Schrader 1972:7)
I should also add that for a long period of time film noir was prominently based on
corruption and despair, and so was perceived as an abnormal representation of the
American character, as a rejection of usually affirmative American commercial
entertainment. As the cycle came to an end sociological changes resulted in a shift in
national preoccupations, those that arouse in essence from a sustained period of economic
prosperity, but which were going to lead into a period of unprecedented national strife in
the sixties. Throughout these three broad phases of film noir, what we discover is that the
majority of noirs can be understood as being genre pieces belonging mainly to the
detective film, the thriller, and the crime mystery melodrama. These can be categorised
separately and yet they also have so much in common.
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