Street with No Name

Of course, a small town can function as well as a city, but it must have those social and legal-political institutions that urban civilization has bequeathed us, for it is in the encounter with these corrupted institutions in one’s pursuit of a derailed American Dream that the film noir displays its greatest vigor. The happiness promised in the daylight normality of home and wholly integrated personal and social relationships runs awry in the face of human weakness and desire. The institutions of the law, the sanctity of marriage and family founding, and the zeal to overcome personal economic distress through ingenuity and hard work fail. The psychic variables of the human condition intrude all too often in the noir world to make these features of American life little more than a cruel deceit. It is, then, a characteristic of the film noir that life is seen through the eyes of the city and its shrewd and often broken

Woolrich, James M. Cain, and Jim Thompson, among others—fashioned this noir landscape in the city and peopled it with troubled and desperate characters whose passions and obsessions drive them to upset a precarious moral ground. It is fitting, then, to begin a definition of the film noir by recognizing the city.

Random movie titles evoke countless variations of a despairing and haunted universe, often of fatalistic design: Where the Sidewalk Ends; The Asphalt Jungle; The Street with No Name; The Big Heat; The Big Sleep; Act of Violence; Force of Evil; Touch of Evil; Desperate; Detour; Caught; Railroaded!; The Set-Up; Kiss Me Deadly; Murder, My Sweet; Fallen Angel; On Dangerous Ground; and In a Lonely Place.1 The directors of these films and their literary counterparts—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell