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Sex with a Smoke (takes a few minutes to consummate)
Before 1960, the world was Black-and-White. Repressed men and women mumbled innuendos through cigarette-clenched lips while calculating degrees of existential resignation. Alcohol circled their dreams like a hungry lion driven by dangerous, 
unresolved conflicts kept in check by car payments, and kids. You know what I mean. If you are 50-years-old or older, you were conceived in a cloud of Chesterfield smoke, and learned to accept lipstick on your restaurant glass as a part of the Surgeon General’s recommended diet for future depressives. Yeah.
Brother, they got these guys on A&E who go on and on: ‘What’s a film noir?’ What’s a film noir?” It’s not a film, man. It’s a world. It started with All Quiet on the Western Front and ended with Cape Fear. That’s Noir, Jack. About 30 years.
Approximately 1,000,000,000 people were born during that 30 years. At least 100,000,000 of those blessed souls were killed by bombs and what-else during the 1940s; and then maybe another 100,000,000 in loose change killed by those well-meaning but misunderstood Communists. Kids shoveled into ovens, old ladies banged over the head with shovels to get their teeth, bombing cities just ’cause . . . . you know. They needed to die.
That’s Noir, man.
Our folks were there. Oh, sure, they didn’t get to experience All of it, but quite a few of ‘em got to see Noir up close and personal. Think of those GIs who slugged it out with Japs in the Pacific.
That’s Noir, Man.
Films like Battleground, which wouldn’t pass muster by today’s hopped up demands for action, were written, filmed and directed by World War II vets. I knew one war vet couldn’t sit through Battleground. I called him ‘Dad.’
Jesus Geewillickers, we gotta explain this stuff to you guys?
If not me, then, allow Lisa Hordnes:
The noir films occurred in America during the war, and continued to be made during the forties and fifties, but it did not come out of nothing. The noirs were inspired both by literature and previous film history along with the sociohistory of the period it grew out of. In America in the thirties there was a literary tradition called hard-boiled novels. These were crime novels and so called pulp fiction, and very popular. The American hard-boiled fictions represented a completely different world and a different kind of detective than those found in english and earlier detective stories; both content and style were differentiated. This kind of fiction added a new tradition of realism to the detective fiction. The hero was as much an anti-hero, the action was taken down on the streets, it was violent, and the language was cut short and it was often marked by verbal wit. Instead of upper-class “detectives”, we are now introduced to the proletarian tough guy detective that are walking the mean streets, and often he finds himself on the edge of law and crime. Contemporary America is described as an urban and industrialized area where people are in the hands of naturalistic drives. Many of these works were adapted to the screen, such as the works of Hammet, Chandler, Cain and McCoy to mention some, and many of the authors were hired by Hollywood as screenwriters. Obviously this hard-boiled fiction had a considerable influence on the film noirs. The Origins of Film Noir
Next time some shiverin’ little rat born after 1960 tells you how tough they got it in this world, mumble “I’m gonna kill ya” through clenched teeth and look real, real crazy.
Under the Shadow.
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