Film noir owes its name not least to its distinctive, somber black-and-white photography. High-contrast shots in the low-key lighting style, in which black can swallow up entire areas of the image and prominent shadows structure the composition, became the supreme form over the course of the 1940s. The ascendancy of film noir was due to expressionist influences from European immigrants among the camera operators, but also points to an awareness of the beauties of the black-and-white film at a time when color was beginning to prevail. Above all, however, low-key lighting, which traditionally was characteristic of dark moods and whole genres such as the gangster film and the war film, was now further refined and more consistently deployed in order to conform to the atmosphere of the films.

In the controversy over whether film noir is a genre, a cycle, or a style, the fact that light plays such a central role causes the pendulum to swing toward style. And so diverse works that would otherwise be categorized as thrillers, woman's films, melodramas, revenge plays, or police films are assigned to this corpus because their lighting clearly speaks the noir language. But patterns for narrative structures and the creation of characters may also condense into a style and infiltrate other traditions of the feature film: subjectivity, voice-over, flashbacks, and dream scenes together with psychologically unstable or criminal protagonists are typical of this trend. Thus, it is difficult to make clear generic distinctions, and it is little wonder that, beyond a small number of core examples, the film noir canon varies from one film historian to the next.

It is, however, striking that the few films with noir qualities that are shot in color rather than black-and-white hardly ever appear on any of the influential lists. For example, the film to be analyzed below, Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947), was long ignored by the scholarship on film noir: