Introduction: Global Fugitives — Outside the Law and the Cold War ‘Consensus’

Abstract

What do Jean Gabin, Stanley Baker, Silvana Mangano and Toshiro Mifune have in common? This book will argue that all four actors, in their participation in a form defined as International Film Noir, played characters who fell afoul of the law and who represented working- and middle-class frustration and dissatisfaction at the way the post-war world was being organized. Until now film noir has been almost solely considered an American phenomenon, consisting, in its classical phase, of dark, seedy, low-budget crime films of the 1940s where the criminal everyman, and woman, was the center of attention. In the contemporary era, noir is recognized as a global form, albeit one that has migrated out from the Hollywood center to the periphery, with other countries and regions (in the present particularly prominent are Mediterranean and Scandinavian noir) adapting the Hollywood form to their own uses. Noir is acknowledged as having international roots in 1920s German Expressionism and 1930s French Poetic Realism, but the form itself is then seen to come to fruition in Hollywood with only scant attention paid to any complementary and parallel expression, and, if so, only in Britain and France.