The following discussion seeks to explore the question of the woman's voice and her story in relation to film noir by taking two films, Raw Deal and Secret beyond the Door, which exhibit a feature singularly associated with film noir, namely, first-person narration. Voice-over narration, together with the narrative device of flashback, was comparatively rare prior to the 1940s in American film, but it became common in that decade, then fell in popularity in the fifties and again in the sixties. This popularity was not confined to the film noir, or even to the detective film, and it precedes the film noir slightly - being strongly established from 1 940, and gaining pre-eminence with Welles's Citizen Kane and Ford's How Green Was My Valley in 1941 ; the first films noirs to use it are Laura, Double Indemnity, The Mask of Dimitrios and Murder, My Sweet, all released in 1944. Subsequently voice-over is more commonly used for films in other genres. It is nevertheless featured in many of the films that have become the key examples of film noir, including not only those just listed above, but also Gilda, The Killers, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Out of the Past.

In film noir the use of voice-over narration is associated with the male hero, often a detective or 'tough guy' investigator whose dialogue is 'hard-boiled' - clipped and cynical. It functions to place the spectator subjectively with the character, allowing us to enter his world through his words. The authority of the voice-over tends to be assumed by convention; but it also conventionally includes the voicing of hesitations and doubts about the hero's perception and interpretation of events, including self-doubt (notably in Gilda, and in Dead Reckoning). The flashback voice-over narration of Mildred Pierce, as of Possessed also starring Joan Crawford, markedly lacks a hard-boiled style and as a result is associated with melodramas or 'woman's pictures', many of which also use this device in this period. In Raw Deal, however, the first-person, present-tense narration by a woman does follow the hard-boiled style of the male film noir hero - though in this film the narrator is not the ostensible protagonist of the film.