San Francisco: The Birthplace of Noir

From Za HiR

Up and Down Mean Streets. A statement by Don Herron and Eddie Mueller on Film Noir’s set in San Francisco. This is from 2003.

“You can make the argument — what the hell, I’ll make it now — that noir was born in San Francisco. Sure, certain striking elements of the form may be traced all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe: the haunted, doomed protagonist; the mysterious female; dark, shadowy streets; crime and murder; the unreliable narrator (hey, the nutcase narrator). But noir, as we know it pretty much, jumped into the public eye when Dashiell Hammett sat down at the typewriter in 1928 in his rooms in 891 Post Street and wrote The Maltese Falcon for the pulp magazine Black Mask.