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.
A returning Navy veteran discovers his wife has been unfaithful and squandered their savings, and when she turns up dead he becomes the prime suspect while also hunting the real killer. Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay directly for the screen, making this one of the definitive returning-veteran noirs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A veteran travels to a New Mexico fiesta town to blackmail the corrupt political boss he holds responsible for his wartime buddy’s murder. Robert Montgomery’s unusual direction emphasizes the alienation and moral ambivalence of the returning soldier.
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.
A war widow’s survivor guilt over five men who died saving her husband is examined through a series of fantasy sequences. Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas make this odd, haunted film more affecting than its premise suggests.
A veteran with a wartime brain injury is committed to a psychiatric hospital after being found unconscious beside his strangled wife. Robert Taylor gives a raw, uncommonly vulnerable performance as a man trapped between his uncertain memory and an indifferent legal system.
College students plan a casino robbery that begins as an intellectual exercise, but one psychologically damaged Korean War veteran cannot distinguish the game from reality. The film is unusually explicit about PTSD as the engine of criminal behavior.