Double Indemnity and the Film Noir

Abstract

The term film noir was first coined by French reviewer Nino Frank when the end of the wartime embargo brought five 1944 Hollywood films — The Woman in the Window, Laura, Phantom Lady, Double Indemnity , and Murder, My Sweet — to Paris in the same week in 1946. All five films seemed to take place in a world marked by menace, violence, and crime and yet distinct from the world of the gangster cycle of the 1930s. In christening the young genre, Frank was thinking not so much of earlier movies as of earlier novels. The label film noir was adapted from Marcel Duhamel's Serie noire translations for Gallimard of British and American hard-boiled novels. The private-eye stories of Dashiell Hammett and of Raymond Chandler, whose gorgeously overwrought prose made him the most obvious stylistic patron of noir, had broken the decorum of the formal detective story from Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie. But an even closer analogue was to be found in the breathless suspense novels of James M. Cain ( The Postman Always Rings Twice , 1934; Double Indemnity , 1936) and Cornell Woolrich ( The Bride Wore Black , 1940; Phantom Lady , 1942), which trapped their heroes in a nightmarishly claustrophobic world of evil.