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[...] The nightclub symbolically concentrated everything that seemed phantasmal about the prosperity of the post-war forties and naturally figures as one of film noir's standard settings. This complex mood of apprehension goes farther towards explaining the characteristic air of grim and baffled fa…

Rather than struggling with a depression, the post-war era lived in fear of one, wrestling with a shadow all the more minatory because it obstinately remained a shadow, a phantasm, not a state of affairs.

The reconstruction of a long-ago public 'mood', like for that matter the interpretation of an existing one, is a species of myth making that deals with a notably inchoate subject; but as with any other kind of fiction, some reconstructions carry more conviction than others. Consider this famous pas…

The most familiar interpretation of film noir presents it as a sort of dark allegory of the post-war 1940s, starring such abstractions as 'the loss of wartime unity' and postwar economic conditions. Or, as Sylvia Harvey writes in her much-quoted article from 1 980: 'The hard facts of economic life …

In 1935 the popular English novelist and playwright J. B . Priestley, travelling in the United States, was alarmed by rumours of a new terrain in the American way of crime. 'It is not a tropical underworld of hot blood and passion, of people too barbaric for the bourgeois virtues,' he wrote in Midn…