James Naremore, “Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction”, 2019:
“Many people recognize a film noir when they see one—or so we might assume from the numerous retrospectives, DVD sets, and books that deal with the subject. But defining the term is notoriously difficult. It’s usually associated with narrative, stylistic, and design qualities of black-and-white Hollywood pictures from the 1940s and 1950s: drifters attracted to sexy women, private eyes hired by femme fatales, criminal heists, corrupt police, young lovers on the run, flashbacks, offscreen narration, shadowy interiors, dark rainy streets, diners, swank nightclubs, snap-brim hats, cigarettes, hard liquor, snub-nose revolvers, and hard-boiled dialog. (“Is there any way to win?” Jane Greer asks Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past [1947]. “There’s a way to lose more slowly,” he replies.)
Such films occupy a fictional zone somewhere between Gothic horror and dystopian science fiction; as narrative formulas, they derive from what Jean-Paul Sartre called the literature of “extreme situations” and what Graham Greene called “blood melodrama”; and as commercial products, they blur the distinction between formulaic entertainment and art films….”
story by Guru Dutt and Balraj Sahni
J. I. Baker, "LIFE Film Noir: 75 Years of the Greatest Crime Films", 2016:
"...The film genre that the French would eventually dub noir (meaning “black”) was created when the visual tropes of German expressionism (think the stark, angular chiaroscuro and Teutonic angst reflected in such silent classics as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) were combined with the influence of the pulp and hard-boiled crime fiction that had been popularized in large part by an American magazine called Black Mask. Influenced by the terse realism of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, the stories limned a seamy world of fedoras, cheap booze, cheaper bars, guns and gumshoes, double-crossing dames, cynicism, doomed boxers, doomed dreamers, doomed gamblers, and doom itself. Often evocative but mostly pedestrian, the pulp tradition nevertheless spawned three authentic geniuses: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain...."
"Out of the Past", 1947, Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum