There’s something so LA about Film Noir. In a similar way to how the novels of Charles Dickens recreate the world of Victorian London, Film Noir perfectly captures the aesthetic and atmosphere of 1940’s and 50’s Los Angeles. The different aspects of the city: its sunny beaches, neat clean suburbs and downtown concrete jungle, make a perfect setting for these dark tales. As the paranoid protagonist falls into a hellish labyrinth of his own making, lured by a beautiful femme fatale and starkly lit by German expressionism, the city itself becomes a major element in the story. 

So, how and why did the genre first appear, and why is it so associated with the city of angels?

Background to Film Noir

When Prohibition ended in 1933 a more sinister and less obvious suppression began in the U.S., censorship of movies. The Hays Production Code (which was established in the aftermath of the Fatty Arbuckle Scandal) required all Hollywood movie scripts be submitted to the organization and their rules spelled out exactly what was acceptable, and unacceptable, content.

In addition to making things such as homosexuality and bad language completely verboten, many rules were simply bizarre. For example if a man and a woman occupied a bed at the same time, one of them had to have their feet on the ground, even if the characters were married. Representatives of the MPA (Motion Picture Association) would show up on set to ensure that nothing improper was being filmed. The MPA thus rapidly became enormously powerful.

This coincided with the Great Depression, when the movie industry saw attendances halve and radio began competing with it as cheaper, stay-at-home, entertainment. Audiences would return to movie theaters in even greater numbers later in the 1930’s (they found they needed Hollywood’s brand of escapism even more as time went on), but it gave the industry a big shock.

Meanwhile, the movie industry in Germany, one of the great film powerhouses at the time, was also in crisis. The Weimar Republic had seen a flowering of its industry in the 1920’s, with films there being seen as both art form and social commentary during a time of extreme economic and political crisis. However, when Hitler came to power in 1933 the German movie community, which contained a large number of jews and homosexuals, had little time to escape the Nazi crackdown. Incredibly, around eight hundred of them made it to Los Angeles, just as the Golden Age of Hollywood was beginning.

At the same time the Great Depression had spawned a group of writers in LA and San Francisco, such as Raymond Chandler, James Cain and Dashiell Hammett, who penned hard-boiled, crime novels, often based on real-life cases. These ‘pulp fiction’ stories were hugely popular, and reflected a nation that was experiencing intense social and economic anxieties. They depicted Los Angeles as a place which was both more open and less cultured than older, East Coast, cities.

This laid the groundwork for a style of filmmaking that caused even the French critics (sacré bleu!) to declare that, at last, Hollywood was actually making art films. They approvingly named the genre ‘film noir’ (although that wasn’t until the 1950’s).

What is Film Noir?

The main characteristics of the genre are a dream-like state, an unsettling strangeness, a sense of moral ambivalence, cruelty and eroticism. Generally the movies were black and white, with dramatic use of shadows and lighting. They always involve crime, such as an insurance scam, and murder. There would often be a voice-over by the hard-bitten male lead, who was often a private detective, or small-time criminal.

Noir movies, almost uniquely for major Hollywood studio films, were allowed to show women wanting sex, although of course it never ended well for the woman (weirdly, the only other genre to show women expressing sexual desire were biblical epics). Partly for this reason Noir movies were very popular with female audiences, a fact that the studios were well aware of, and they made every effort to capitalize on it by making more of them .

LA Noir

As film production increased in the late 1930’s the B-movie made up a large part of the studios’ output. The crews that made them included many Weimar emigres, who were given lower budgets, cheaper source material and fading (or emerging) stars.

Adapting the hardboiled crime stories of the 1920’s and 30’s, these films were shot in black and white because the film stock and processing was much cheaper than technicolor, but it allowed the directors to give full play to their expressionist sensibilities and the material’s social critique. The sexually charged and violent atmospheres and backgrounds of the films overcame many of the restrictions of the Hays Code, by using suggestion, symbolism, shadows and innovative music, to create a powerful effect.

Hollywood had matured and audiences enthusiastically responded.

With less access to the studio backlots (except at night, when they could reuse film sets from bigger budget movies) the directors chose to film in downtown Los Angeles, which was more similar in style to the cities in Europe from whence they had come, and the neighborhood itself often became a character in the story. Its gritty urban landscape, frequently juxtaposed with the Westside’s brighter, warmer, more spacious persona, features in many classic Film Noirs.

Popular locations used in Noir films include the Bradbury Building, Angels Flight, Bunker Hill, LA City Hall and Union Station. Classic Noir movies that filmed in the area include Double Indemnity (1944), D.O.A. (1949), Criss Cross (1949) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). 

In the latter film gumshoe Mike Hammer walks the dusty, deserted streets of Bunker Hill, searching for a a missing woman. Hammer finds a book of poetry that she left behind in her room, and he reads a verse by Christina Rossetti:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once we had

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

In other words, ignorance is bliss.

Or is it? The private eye repeats the words again and again as he searches for the woman, but he finds it gives him no existential peace. Quentin Tarantino was heavily influenced by this film noir classic when making Pulp Fiction (1996).

The lines from the poem can also be read as an ode to Victorian Bunker Hill, which was shortly to fall to the wrecking ball in the name of progress. From time to time the new Bunker Hill, reborn as the gleaming Financial District with shiny glass and steel office towers, has been used for Noir inspired movies, such as The Driver (1978) and Heat (1995).

Birth of Neo-Noir

By then, with the end of the studio system and the B-movie at the end of the 1950’s, Film Noir as a genre was done, but its influence on the medium, through realism, psychology and symbolism, meant movies would never be the same again. Each new generation of filmmakers would continue to create its own versions of Noir, now known as neo-noir (meaning new noir).

Such films as The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), Bladerunner (1982), a sci-fi Noir film, L.A. Confidential (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and, more recently, Aaron Katz’s Gemini (2017), follow in this rich tradition. All of them were set and shot in Los Angeles, the city once again showing its range of locations, suitable for shooting period, science fiction and contemporary movies, to new audiences.

Film Noir in LA Today

If you’re planning a visit to LA, or especially if you live here, watching these films opens a window on a different side of the city to the one that most people know, and it gives insight on an important period in Los Angeles and film history. Plus they’re just so enjoyable.

Our DTLA Murder Mystery Ghost tour begins at the Biltmore Hotel, last known location of Elizabeth Short – AKA the Black Dahlia – who was murdered in 1947. Her very sobriquet was pulled from a hugely popular LA Noir movie, The Blue Dahlia, (1946) which had come out just the year before her murder. The tour ends at City Hall, another location used in that very film.

The LA: Food + History + Design tour begins at Union Station, used in Noir films such as Union Station and Blade Runner, and visits other classic settings, such as Olvera Street, City Hall and the Bradbury Building, which features in D.O.A., Double Indemnity, Chinatown and Blade Runner.

If you have any feedback on Film Noir: A Dark Side Of The City Of Angels please email us or reach out on social media, we’d love to hear from you.

– By Stuart Wood (Twitter) and Damien Blackshaw (Twitter)