Beginning with Prosopa lismonimena/Forgotten Faces (dir. Tzavellas, 1946), the immediate post-war years witnessed several noir productions in Greece. In this chapter I follow a timeline which sets the end of the first post-war noir phase with O anthropos tou trainou/The Man on the Train (dir. Dimopoulos, 1958), a film based on a screenplay by Yannis Maris. My discussion of this first phase focuses on To Pontikaki/The Little Mouse (1953). Written and directed jointly by Giorgos Asimakopoulos and Nikos Tsiforos, and produced by Anzervos, then a major player in Greek cinema, the film has been recently ‘rediscovered’ through Greek television and social media. It attracts curious viewers, mostly because it features, for the first time in an ingénue role, Aliki Vougiouklaki (Lazaridis 1999: 298–301). She would later become the bestknown star of Greek cinema, and certainly remains the best-remembered one. Her character, Krinoula, orphaned during the German Occupation and called by everyone Pontikaki (‘little mouse’), gives the film its name. She has a substantial function in the plot development, saving the young criminal Loukis (Giorgos Lefteriotis). This is, nevertheless, not only a film about young love reaffirming what is best in the condition humaine, even amid a criminal milieu. By following the lives of an older and two young petty criminals in Piraeus, it also addresses in a realist, perhaps even neorealist way, broad social issues of its time: poverty, juvenile delinquency and overseas migration as consequences of the war.

Is Noir Greek Enough?

Questions of verisimilitude and film realism played a crucial role in discourses on post-war film, while current discussions of genre and European noir also inform the classification options when discussing a particular film (on European noir, see Spicer 2007; Broe 2014; Pillard 2014; for Greece: Poupou 2007; Dermentzoglou 2007; Fotiou and Fessas 2017). Critical rhetoric at the time and during the formative years of the New Greek Cinema consistently referred to an assumed escapism of Greek post-war cinema and to its silence vis-àvis the realities of its spectators’ lives. But the early post-war noir films offer enough material to demonstrate that cinema did engage with its surrounding society through relatable stories and characters, albeit in a different stylistic framework from that of mainstream cinema of the 1960s and of auteur cinema.