"You could always find me in the theater round the corner. People like me liked our pictures dark and mysterious. Most were B movies made on the cheap. Others were classy models with A talent, but they all had one thing in common. They lived on the edge. (They) told stories about life on the streets: shady characters; crooked cops; twisted love and bad luck. The French invented a name for these pictures: Film Noir. 'Black Film', that's what they called them; about a darker side of human nature; about the world as it really was". That description is a bit hyperbolic, yet it does convey perhaps a good sense of the atmosphere that these types of stories tend to evoke. Another ingredient in the fiction of Noir is the way a lot of its most famous creative expressions seem to have been generated by the emotional fallout of the Second World War. Edward Muller details this in his book Dark City.
So it is possible to see this as an ingredient in the makeup of the modern form of Noir. The problem with leaving it at this, however, is that it still doesn't bring us to the core of the sub-genre. Neither Widmark nor Muller are able to lead us to the beating heart of the contemporary Mystery Thriller, and show us the engine that has kept powering this type of narrative throughout the years. In order to do that, we have to go beyond and before the War years, out of the realm of cinema, and way back into the field of literature. We have to go right back, in fact, to that same strand of literary Romanticism that Widmark and Muller claim to repudiate. A closer look at the genre's origins, however, reveals that such clear-cut separations are less easy to make, and that perhaps the true allure of the Noir story is that it in fact does have a Romantic strain all its own. It may count as something of a riff on a more familiar generic type of fictional narrative, yet the Romance of it all still remains, even when painted in darker shades. The best excavation of the nature of this type of storytelling comes from the pages of Paul Meehan's Horror Noir: Where Cinema's Dark Sisters Meet. His basic premise, that the fiction of gangsters, detectives, psychos, femme fatales, and the type of alienated, lonely protagonists who stalk the world of Martin Scorsese's films all have their origin in the Horror genre is the most convincing.
It gives a greater sense of scope, perspective, and literary weight to the sub-genre, and helps us to gain a better sense of its overall artistic nature. As Meehan helpfully informs the reader, "When it first emerged as a genre during the 1940s, film noir derived its distinctive visual style from the horror film. Like horror, film noir exists inside a shadow realm of fear, darkness, fate and death. Both forms exhibit a propensity toward nightmarish dream imagery and surrealism. While it's more difficult to discern commonalities between the realms of science fiction and film noir, the connection with the horror genre is much more obvious. The modern horror and mystery literary genres both had their origin in 18th and 19th-century gothic fiction, where the workings of human perversity were played out amid the trappings of the supernatural. The works of authors Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle defined the emerging mystery genre in these early years, and the grotesqueries of gothic fiction were later reflected in the works of proto-noir American writers like Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain (1)". I think Meehan's insight of Noir's relation to Gothic fiction is the key one.
It provides the final puzzle piece that completes the picture, and allows a greater sense of coherent order to the more impressionistic thoughts of Widmark and Muller. In making a sustainable claim for Noir as an offshoot of Horror fiction, it also expands our understanding of a very particular mid-20th century expression of the American Gothic, and allows us the opportunity of viewing Noir as a sub-genre of Horror with a shared storytelling vocabulary, allowing for a greater sense of thematic overlap. It also gives a better sense of generic definition. Looked at from this angle, a Noir is little else except the setup and format of the classic 19th century Gothic novel of manners updated to a modern urban setting and environment. The feasibility of this definition can be found by appealing to an undisputed master of the sub-genre. Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca is based off of a 1938 novel written by Daphne Du Maurier. With the exception of the book's then contemporary setting, the plot itself is nothing less than the kind of 1800s style bodice ripper complete with star crossed lovers, a Byronic hero with a troubled past, and a creepy housekeeper who knows where all the skeletons are in the closets.
Rounding it all off is the setting of the main action in a spooky, old dark house straight out of Poe or Mary Shelley. The entire plot amounts to a kind of B grade melodrama, however Hitch's direction manages to give it an A list budget. In both its story and atmosphere, Rebecca is the kind of tale that validates Meehan's thesis that Noir is, in the last resort, an off-shoot of Horror. This is not to say that either genre has to be taken in a one-hundred percent serious tone. Sometimes even the genre of crime and corruption can surprise you with its sense of humor. That's the case with today's film. Produced in 1945, and directed by a forgotten filmmaker known as Charles David, this is Lady on a Train.
