The filmmakers who made the great noirs of the 1940s and 50s had no idea they were making film noir. They thought they were shooting cheap crime melodramas for the bottom half of a double bill. The name came from French critic Nino Frank in 1946, after a wartime ban on American films lifted and years of Hollywood output flooded French cinemas at once, revealing a pattern the Americans were too close to see. This episode asks what film noir actually is and how it came to be.

The conversation traces the ingredients: German Expressionist shadows carried to Hollywood by directors like Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak fleeing Nazism, the hard-boiled pulp of Hammett, Cain and Chandler, French poetic realism and Italian neorealism, all landing on an audience made cynical by World War II and the atomic age. It explains why so many noir hallmarks were  ...