Some writers, like Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward in their Film Noir encyclopedia, have claimed that film noir is a "wholly American film style." For many, film noir can only refer to the set of black and white American crime films produced during, and in the first decade and a half following, WWII -- the films to which French critics first applied the label. With all due respect to Silver and Ward, whose book demands a place on the shelves of any serious film fan, we don't cotton to that around here. It's all fine, well and good for film historians in love with typologies to narrowly define and sub-divide genres all they want; I'm sure it makes a great parlor trick to impress the ladies. But I don't see much use for that way of thinking. As my grandfather probably never said, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's probably a duck, or at least an advanced robotic simulation of a duck." So film fans interested in following the hunted men and dangerous women through shadowy urban mazes are bound to eventually find themselves in spaces far removed from post-war America. The noir thread continues, of course, in subsequent American films like Blade Runner and Brick, but it also crosses the oceans to be woven into the tapestries of other national cinemas. In England, for example, the filmmakers at Hammer Studios developed the skills in gloomy atmospherics that would make the studio's name synonymous with horror while working on assembly line noirs. In France, Jean-Pierre Melville would meld the genre with a chilly existentialism that elevated it to high art. And in Japan, there was Nikkatsu.
