The name is French and it has connections to German expressionist cinema, but film noir was inspired by the American Raymond Chandler, whose prose gripped the realism of the seedy hotels, dimly lit bars, back streets and country clubs, mansions and cul-desac apartments, corporate boardrooms, and flop houses of America. Chandler and the other writers and directors, including Dashiell Hammett, Jane Greer, Ken Annakin, Guy Green, Guy Hamilton, Rouben Mamoulian and Mike Mazurki are the main focus of this work. It correlates the rise of film noir with the new appetites of the American public after World War II and explains how it was developed by smaller studios and filmmakers as a result of the emphasis on quality within a deliberately restricted element of cities at night.