Finally, a large part of the appeal of film noir in the forties, when Woolrich's peculiar vision was so often screened is also an explanation of why film noir faded in the dull sunshine of the fifties; it is a matter of 'Art and Evil', as Robert Lowell phrased it in an unfinished essay of 1955 about the literary-moral atmosphere after World War Two:

Old classics no longer pleased; but presently we discovered with relief that supposedly sound authors were much worse than they seemed. We discovered the black, nihilistic, homosexual, almost disintegrating Shakespeare of Measure for Measure, Troilus, Hamlet and Timon. We discovered a black, gin-drinking Tennyson. We discovered a black, wolfish, wife-deserting Dickens, whose grotesque Hieronymus Bosch world struck us as God's plenty, a richer creation than any English writer's since Shakespeare. Then, a funny thing happened ; just as we had labeled our times the Age of Anxiety, and had managed to point out an ample and redeeming shadow of darkness in just about every writer who had ever lived - just at this point we suddenly found we were midway in a second solid, sensible, wealthy, optimistic, child-bearing era, one not unlike the times of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Out of the black earth of our evil authors and evil visions, we had somehow rebuilt our own booming 1870s, '80s, and '90s, complete with their dynasties of Republican Presidents.