Laura (1944) and Blood Simple (1984) were made forty years apart and yet derive much of their vitality from similar film conventions. At the same time, the two films are very different in their treatment of the generic conventions. Both could be classified loosely as crime films, with the older being a police-detective story and the newer a more freewheeling and more cynical rehashing of various crime film conventions. Both take their shape from the style known as film noir. This is more a style than a genre in that no one in the 1940s when the style developed was consciously making a film noir. The term was applied long after by French critics who noticed a stylistic shift in American films in that period. The impetus for this approach to telling a story can be seen to have developed from the general social attitudes and psychological intensities of the World War II and post-World War II American social scene. The style would have an influence long after that historical period ended. Indeed, it continues to have an influence today, though the underlying social dynamic that produced it in the first place changed long ago. Yet, there is something in the film noir that appeals to and expresses darker aspects of the human soul and so has a resonance still. Laura was produced as the film noir was developing into a full-blown style, while Blood Simple makes conscious use of certain film noir conventions in order to create a slyly different type of story.
The film noir was a social, psychological, and aesthetic response to a certain sense of societal angst that developed first in the uncertainties of World War II, a period of world tensions manifested in the psychological ambiguities of film noir, and then continued in the new uncertainties of the Cold War period, especially in the years immediately after World War II when American society was straining to recover from the war while also trying to adapt to the new line-up of i...