Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 52

Popular Culture Review

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motivated murder and studded with high-powered Freudian
implication. O f the quantity of such films now in vogue. Double
Indemnity^ Murder My Sweet, Conflict and Laura are a quartet
of the most popular which quickly come to mind. Shortly to be
followed by Twentieth Century-Fox’s The Dark Corner and
The High Window, MGM’s The Postman Always Rings Twice
and The Lady in the Lake, Paramount’s Blue Dahlia and
Warner’s Serenade and The Big Sleep
Studio publicity, industry trade papers and The New York Times argued
that this “quartet constitutes a mere vanguard of the cinematic homicide to come,”
noting Hollywood’s escalating crime bandwagon: “Every studio in town has at
least two or three similar blood-freezers before the cameras right now, which means
that within the next year or so movie murder particularly with a psychological
twist will become almost as common as the weekly newsreel or musical.
In Hollywood’s industry shift from wartime to postwar narrative film
strategies, 1940s industry and trade papers indicate a clearly observable cycle of
crime films produced during World War II— affected, influenced and enabled by
war-related conditions—originating prior to 1946 French discourse which critically
coined "fllm noir"" Rather than the war being a hiatus in the development of a
primarily postwar film movement, fully-articulated fllm noir actually emerged in
the U.S. as an aspect o f film production and spectatorship under wartime
circumstances before the 1946 critical inception and canonization conceived in
France, developing as a wartime style and Hollywood crime trend described, and
clearly identified by a term circulated widely, as “red meat.” World War II created
a complex set of circumstances which converged in an intricate network of
interacting wartime production conditions. These war-related 1940s (national)
cultural, industrial and production factors, or “generative mechanisms,” culminated
in an emeigent wartime c inematic style of dark “realism” in what industry discourse
termed a racy “red meat” crime trend, soon to be coined film noir after the war.
Rowan University

Sheri Chinen Biesen

Notes
1. Raymond Chandler quoted in Lloyd Shearer, “Crime Certainly Pays on the Screen:
The growing crop o f homicidal films poses questions for psychologists and producers,”
The New York Times, August 8, 1945.
2. See Fred Stanley, “Hollywood Crime and Romance,’' The New York Times, November
19,1944; and Lloyd Shearer, “Crime Certainly Pays on the Screen: The growing crop
o f homicidal films poses questions for psychologists and producers,” The New York
Times, Augast 8, 1945.