Your point is a good one, Mike, and rips apart the lack of thought I put into my post.

But, as you know, I feel film noir is not a genre. Perhaps it may be best to describe it as the closest thing to a genre without being a genre. It has its own codes and conventions, aesthetic style, narrative devices (flashbacks, voiceovers), gender representations, and other social ideological stances. But it was never a genre in the same vain as the other three American categories of the studio system, the Gangster, Musical and Western. Nobody ever said "I'm making a film noir; nor did any promotional poster read "the latest film noir!" I think it was Wilder himself who said he never classed his films as such, but just went out to make a good film, or a thriller, or whatever.

It was the French critics who first coined the term film noir, at the end of World War II, when American films from Wilder, Huston et al. poured into French cinémas for the first time. That, then, means (assumingly) that the "genre" was one of coincidental origin. Which of course marks the likes of M (1931) and other noir films which predate this period (see Fame's fairly comprehensive list above) even more remarkable, and marks Lang as, in terms of being ahead of his time, even more of a visionary than Welles. But of course noir stems, stylistically, from the German Expressionist period, so Lang's influence doesn't seem so surprising (indeed, M may act as a go-between for noir and Expressionism).

I'm rambling, and getting grossly off-topic.

Thanks for reading,
Mick