Post #508244 by Atomic Tiki Punk on Mon, Feb 1, 2010 3:38 AM

I guess I have a couple more cents worth...

"The Classic Film Noir period" started when the big studios needed more B-Movies to fill the movie theaters
up till the late 1960's, later in the Midwest states, when you went to the movies you got a double feature
The main movie or A-Picture was the headline & the B-Picture was the second feature

With small budgets, short shooting schedules and much less studio interference & a pool of contract actors to choose from, Directors
would figure out ways to get the job done, By using creative lighting, sparse sets, even using available light sources such as street lights
or a single lit light bulb would get rather stark & dramatic scenes, using shadow & light in place of a costly sets,would establish a mood
& save money.

while a large cast and extras were out of the question, small stories that favored small budgets were the order of the day.
Directors & Writers were encouraged to be creative, so we got more style & dialog in these B-Movies.

At this time these kind of movies did not have an actual genre name other than "Crime" movies

(Film Noir (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics (first by Nino Frank in 1946)
The term film noir would not become commonplace in international critical circles until the publication
of the book Panorama du film Noir Americain (1955) by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton)
But it wasn't until 1973 that The New York Times first used the term that would then became common in the United States.

[ Edited by: Atomic Tiki Punk 2014-09-01 05:19 ]