No film genre in Hollywood’s golden age was more urban to its core than noir. The word conjures up dark alleyways, all night diners, the mean streets. Its wave of popularity in the 1940s coincided exactly with
No film genre in Hollywood’s golden age was more urban to its core than noir. The word conjures up dark alleyways, all night diners, the mean streets. Its wave of popularity in the 1940s coincided exactly with the apex of cities in American life. A century of industrialization and the factory boom provided by World War II meant a higher percentage of Americans lived in cities in the 1940s than at any other time in American history, before or since.
The idea that the city’s problems needed a suburban antidote circulated before the suburbs were even built. Just take a look at The City, a documentary made by urban planners for the 1939 World’s Fair that presents cities as dehumanizing hell holes while promoting an ideal planned suburb as an alternative full of happy (white) children. The suburban onslaught’s ideation is present in classic noir, even if none of it ever happens in the suburbs. After all, could you imagine Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend crazily jonesing for a bottle of rotgut whiskey in Rye or Syosset instead of Manhattan? In the postwar period the dark, dangerous urban world of noir represented what so many people were hoping to break away from in their prefabricated subdivisions.
Neo-noir, a genre that began in the late 60s with films like Point Blank is also rooted in the rough city streets, but in cities that had been transformed by suburbanization and deindustrialization. American cities were starved of resources after World War II in favor of all the Levittowns sprouting around them. Those subdivisions became a green-lawned, stripmalled noose. The subdivisions gleamed and the interstate highways built to connect them to the city blasted urban neighborhoods apart. African American city dwellers rose up in defiance against racist policing and ghettoization in the 1960s, but the long hot summers of strife were only met with white flight and no money to fix the damage once the dust cleared and fires died out.
We tend to think of the 1950s as the high point of suburbanization, but it was actually in the 1970s when the number of people living in the suburbs first outnumbered those in the cities. In the midst of the polyester decade’s malaise New York City almost went bankrupt and Detroit, to name just one city, lost one fifth of its population. In recent decades, however, many American cities have experienced a wave of gentrification that has priced out older residents and transformed neighborhoods.
Traces of America’s cities post-suburbanization and pre-gentrification are disappearing as corner bars become microbreweries and parks are taken over by strollers and dogs. The best place today to find those lost cities in all their dirty glory is in the realist films of the 70s and early 80s. New York in the 1970s is synonymous in our cultural imagination with Taxi Driver. Philadelphia’s unique grit is display