Post-War Trauma and Disillusionment
World War II created the emotional conditions for film noir as surely as it created the prosperity that ostensibly rendered the genre’s dark worldview unnecessary. The veterans who returned from combat had seen what human beings were capable of and could not fully re-enter the fantasies of peacetime domesticity and commercial ambition. In these films, the war is always present as an absence — the thing that cannot be spoken directly but that warps every relationship and poisons every aspiration. The noir veteran is a man who won the war and then found himself stranded in a peace he cannot use.
10 Post-War Trauma and Disillusionment Noir Films:
The Best Years of Our Lives
Three servicemen returning to their hometown after the war discover that civilian life has moved on without them, their marriages, careers, and self-conceptions all requiring painful renegotiation. William Wyler’s film is the most honest and humane treatment of the veteran’s re-entry problem in American cinema.
Crossfire
A demobilized soldier’s murder of a Jewish man is investigated by a persistent army detective in a film that connects wartime violence to postwar anti-Semitism with brutal clarity. Robert Young, Robert Ryan, and Robert Mitchum all deliver career-defining performances.
Act of Violence
A prosperous ex-GI is hunted by a veteran he betrayed in a POW camp, and must decide whether to flee or face the consequences of a wartime choice he has spent years justifying to himself. Van Heflin and Robert Ryan create a morally complex study in guilt and legitimate grievance.
Dead Reckoning
An Army officer investigates the disappearance of his wartime buddy, who had gone AWOL to escape a murder conviction, and finds himself entangled with a dangerous woman from his friend’s past. Humphrey Bogart plays a man whose military discipline provides no protection against civilian treachery.
Somewhere in the Night
An amnesiac veteran follows a trail of cryptic clues through the Los Angeles underworld to discover who he was before the war — and why someone wanted that person dead. The film treats wartime as literally having erased the protagonist’s previous identity.
Ride the Pink Horse
A veteran travels to a New Mexico fiesta town to blackmail the corrupt political boss he holds responsible for his wartime buddy’s murder, finding himself outmaneuvered by forces he didn’t anticipate. Robert Montgomery’s unusual direction emphasizes the alienation and moral ambivalence of the returning soldier.
The Crooked Way
A veteran with combat-induced amnesia returns to Los Angeles and discovers his forgotten past includes a criminal record, corrupt police connections, and a former partner who wants him dead. The film is unusually direct about the psychological damage inflicted by combat.
The Guilt of Janet Ames
A war widow’s survivor guilt over five men who died saving her husband is examined through a series of fantasy sequences in a film that takes post-war trauma seriously as a psychological phenomenon. Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas make this odd, haunted film more affecting than its premise suggests.
High Wall
A veteran with a wartime brain injury is committed to a psychiatric hospital after being found unconscious beside his strangled wife, and must fight both his own unreliable mind and a system disposed to believe the worst of him. The film uses the asylum setting to explore the postwar equation of combat trauma with criminal potential.
The Fallen Sparrow
A veteran of the Spanish Civil War who was tortured by fascists returns to New York only to find the same evil pursuing him in the form of Nazi agents still seeking a battle standard. John Garfield plays a man whose wartime trauma has made him both more resourceful and more vulnerable than ordinary men.
CLASSIC NOIR 