One of the most potent and influential film styles has been labeled the film noir by certain French critics who noticed a stylistic shift in American films in the 1940s. As Paul Schrader notes with reference to a statement by Raymond Durgnat, film noir is not a genre and is not defined in terms of conventions of setting and conflict. Instead, it is defined by the subtler qualities of tone and mood and is also defined by its time period:
In general, film noir refers to those Hollywood films of the forties and early fifties that portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption (Schrader 170).
Of course, there is more to the mood of the film noir than the external evidence of wet city streets and crime, and film noir actually derives from the sense of displacement and angst during and after World War II. 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. A film that evokes the time and place as well as the mood is Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974).
Actually, Chinatown is set slightly before the era of the classic film noir, but it makes use of the same sense of fate gone awry. Cawelti rightly points out how the film evokes the genre of the hard-boiled mystery in a variety of ways, a formula that has been much used and that says something key about American popular culture:
Next to the western, the hard-boiled detective story is America's most distinctive contribution to the world's stock of action-adventure stories, our contemporaneous embodiment of the drama of heroic quest which has appeared in so many different cultures in so many different guises (Cawelti 503).
The hard-boiled detective story is the classic private detective story, and it is central in Chinatown in the form of Jake Gittes. The film is set in Los Angeles in 19...