by Alexandra Edwards

As Josh so succinctly stated in our previous article on defining film noir, it’s pretty much pointless.  For every definition, at least one film breaks the rules.  And yet, we know what we mean when we use the term.  There are several general tropes (for lack of a better word) on view in the main body of noir films.  In this article, we’ll explore just a few of them.

The Plot Tropes of Film Noir

Defining a consistent set of film noir tropes is a difficult task.  Because noir isn’t strictly a genre, like Westerns or romantic comedies, the films and their plots have run the gamut over the years.  If you can dream it, there’s probably been a noir about it — including bowling, high school dances, hot robot chicks, and even Superman.  But every film style had to start somewhere, and for noir, it all started with crime.

Crime and Detective stories

Not all film noirs feature a detective plot, but the two are firmly intertwined, and have been ever since Bogey portrayed shamus Sam Spade in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941).  The typical noir hero is working his way through a mystery of some sort.  His relationship to the law may vary — he could be a private eye, like Spade, or an insurance investigator, like Double Indemnity‘s Walter Neff — but the mystery usually involves a crime of some kind.  Even regular Joes with no previous detective experience get in on the action:  in our film for the month, The Third Man, Holly Martins may be a mere writer, but he attacks the case of Harry Lime’s disappearance with fervor.

The crimes allow the plot structure to unfold in front of the viewer — the audience quite literally takes the same journey as the hero.  It also adds to the uncertainty, a huge factor in noir plots, and the sometimes labyrinthine plots.  False leads and McGuffins abound, and from one moment to the next, the floor could be pulled out from under the hero (and the audience).

Flashbacks and Voiceovers

The complicated structure of a noir plot can also involve heavy use of flashbacks.  Some noirs (Double Indemnity, Detour) are told entirely in flashback, using narration as a frame device.  In general, narration can help to guide a viewer through the complicated plot structure, going over clues and offering exposition.  (Or course, this narration can also serve to further confuse the story, as in neo-noir Memento.)  The hero himself usually serves as narrator, often employing the kind of hard-boiled language that detective stories and noirs have become known for.

Literary Source Material

That hard-boiled language is due in large part to noir’s literary roots, in the detective stories of Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, James M. Cain, and others.  Chances are, if a noir has become a classic, it was based on a novel (usually by one of these three).

Raymond Chandler, who debuted as a novelist with The Big Sleep in 1939, soon became the most famous author of the hardboiled school. Not only were Chandler’s novels turned into major noirs—Murder, My Sweet (1944; adapted from Farewell, My Lovely), The Big Sleep (1946), and Lady in the Lake (1947)—he was an important screenwriter in the genre as well, producing the scripts for Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951). Where Chandler, like Hammett, centered most of his novels and stories on the character of the private eye, Cain featured less heroic protagonists and focused more on psychological exposition than on crime solving; the Cain approach has come to be identified with a subset of the hardboiled genre dubbed “noir fiction“.  — Wikipedia

Interestingly, this style of detective fiction became popular long before the Second World War, which is usually credited as influencing noir’s dark and pessimistic attitude.  The seedy American underbelly has clearly been a fascination for writers and artists since at least the turn of the 20th century — and with neo-noirs still being produced, the fascination obviously hasn’t faded.

The Imperiled Hero — Injuries and Fights

Phillip Marlowe gets interrogated in Murder, My Sweet.  This is only one of several times Marlowe finds himself in physical danger in the film.

Everybody knows if you’re going to solve a crime, you got to bust a few heads.  Noir heroes are known for getting into multiple scrapes per film.  But unlike action stars, the noir hero doesn’t always emerge from the fight victorious.  Many noirs have a rule of three when it comes to injuries: a hero will be significantly hurt three times during the course of the story.  These injuries can lead to blackouts, like they do in Murder, My Sweet, which often serves to jump the plot forward, further complicating the investigation.

Urban Settings

Big cities just have more crime, and so it makes sense that most noirs are set in urban locations.  Streetlights, wet cement, steam from a sewer grate — these images are classics of noir cities.  And, as Rockstar Games so deftly picked up on, the most noir city of all is L.A.  The paradox is pretty much the point: underneath the scrubbed clean West Coast sunshine, there lies a dark and seedy underworld.  Color noirs like Chinatown have exploited the use of L.A. in order to make an even more blatant point about the land of endless sunshine and murder.  But for my money, Double Indemnity will always be the best use of L.A. as noir setting.

California in general seems to be the perfect mix of post-war optimism and hopelessness, and memorable noirs have been set in San Francisco as well.

In the eyes of many critics, the city is presented in noir as a “labyrinth” or “maze”. Bars, lounges, nightclubs, and gambling dens are frequently the scene of action. The climaxes of a substantial number of film noirs take place in visually complex, often industrial settings, such as refineries, factories, trainyards, power plants—most famously the explosive conclusion of White Heat, set at a chemical plant. In the popular (and, frequently enough, critical) imagination, in noir it is always night and it always rains. — Wikipedia

The truly tricky feat is to set a noir in the middle of nowhere.  It has been done successfully a few times, in films such as They Drive by Night and Night of the Hunter.  Another handful of noirs are set in foreign cities, such as The Third Man, which capitalizes on post-war Vienna.  But the use of an old world European city makes films like The Third Man outliers in noir, which usually emphasizes the newness of modern American cities.

The Third Man uses post-WWII Vienna to mix city street scenes with images of civilization in decay.  Note the large pile of rubble to the left in this still.

Moral Ambiguity and the Hays Code

Finally, one of the most notable tropes of film noir is its rampant pessimism, often expressed as moral ambiguity.  The noir world is inherently corrupt, lacks any sense of reason or ultimate justice, and frequently crushes its heroes (and anti-heroes) under the burden of cruel fate.

And yet, the original spate of noirs released in the 40s were bound by the Hays Code to, as Wikipedia describes, “see that steadfast virtue was ultimately rewarded and vice, in the absence of shame and redemption, severely punished (however dramatically incredible the final rendering of mandatory justice might be).” Thus, a film like The Third Man must punish its villain in the final moments of the film (even if that punishment itself expresses something of the story’s inherent pessimism).

However, it seems that, when remembering the stylistic qualities of film noir, viewers and critics tend to recall the moral ambiguity of the beginning and middle of these films, and not the stridently moral endings imposed by the Hays/Breen Office.  The Hays Code, it seems, has had little effect on the overall feeling of film noir.

This moral ambiguity is even more apparent in the post-Code neo-noirs produced in the past 50 years.  Without a requirement to enforce punishment for the wicked, neo-noirs like Chinatown and Memento have utilized dark endings, absent of justice, to further emphasize their pessimistic tone.

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For the best breakdown on noir plots around the web, see Film Site’s extensive noir section.