Hollywood movie makers of the 1940’s didn’t necessarily set out to make cinematic history. In fact, many of them were European émigrés escaping Nazism, who were merely trying to adopt the tone and voice of their new country, which they discovered in no less an American style than hard-boiled pulp novels. But their more sophisticated European visual sensibilities and more nuanced philosophical orientation elevated what had been planned as cheap entertainment and led to the creation of a new American cinematic art form — a form that French cinematographers later referred to as Film Noir and cited as a major influence for the French New Wave of the late 1950’s and 1960’s.
And though the genre didn’t yet have a name in the 1940’s, it drew the interests and talents of serious American authors, such as William Faulkner, who helped write the screenplay for Murder, My Sweet (1944), which was an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely – renamed because Dick Powell, the actor playing Chandler’s most famous character, Phillip Marlowe, previously had been best known as a pretty-faced song-and-dance man, and the filmmakers didn’t want audiences to mistakenly think Powell was starring in another musical.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly660cwH9ug
– Rich Horton
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