This article about a screening of several noirs is good too:
Film noir was the fancy French term for a strain of fatalistic American crime pictures that flourished during the early postwar years. Sharing stylistic elements like chiaroscuro lighting, labyrinthine plots and bitterly ironic endings, these movies often found their morally dubious male anti-heroes rendered helpless by powerful, overtly sexualized femme fatales. You don’t have to be an armchair psychologist to see how such cheap crime stories spoke to the fears of traumatized men returning from WWII to discover that women had become far more independent in their absence.
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Bogart originally wanted his wife Lauren Bacall for the female lead [for "In a Lonely Place", but Warner Bros. wouldn’t let her out of her contract. So they went with director Ray’s wife Gloria Grahame, which only added to the self-reflexive hothouse psychodrama of it all since their marriage was falling apart and the filmmaker wound up sleeping on the set — in [the protagonist]’s apartment, no less!