[...] 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 fatality in film noir than any passing downturn, as in 1947 or 1949, that actually occurred. Henry Adams's description of New York in 1905 applied even more exactly - uncannily so - forty years later. 'The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning . . . Prosperity never before imagined, power not yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid: It was obvious that the new world of 1945 would be one of huge scale and bureaucratic rationality, and post-war film noir registers both resignation and resentment at the prospect. (Some alarmists on the right terrified themselves with the fear of a social-democratic planet, and that fear, too, found its way into film noir with the figure of the labour racketeer.) Yet a more than vestigial fear lingered that somehow the worst conditions of the Depression would return. In August 1932 ajournalist had asked John Maynard Keynes if there had ever before been a calamity like the Depression. He replied, 'Yes. It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.'