This inclusiveness is abetted by studio home video departments, which will designate any film with the above attributes a film noir because the label is sexy and apparently helps sell DVDs.

In the process, the term gets so vague as to be useless.  I would
argue that there is a core set of films that are truly and uniquely noir,
reflecting a particular time in America, with a particular mind-set, a
mood of existential dread that seemed to invade the American psyche
after the end of WWII, at the beginning of the atomic age.



This sense of dread was in the air before then, of course, as the world
hurtled towards war.  It can be felt very clearly in some dark
films made during the war — in Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt, in Wilder's Double Indemnity, in Huston's The Maltese Falcon.  The first two of those films, along with Leave Her To Heaven, fall into a distinct category of their own — the domestic noir.

The Maltese Falcon seems on its surface to belong to another distinct category, the hardboiled detective thriller, which had noirish
elements but whose essentially noble protagonist rescued it from
existential dread.  Yet Bogart's Sam Spade seems to be losing
faith in the nobility of his code, to see it as meaningless, and I
think that fact alone allows one to call The Maltese Falcon a true film noir.  Just compare Bogart's Spade to his Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, which plays like a hardboiled romantic comedy by comparison with Huston's film.



The point about The Maltese Falcon can be argued, of course, and I place it among the true films noirs with that reservation in mind.  Here are some of the other films I think of as truly noir, without such reservations:



Out Of the Past
The Killers



His Kind Of Woman


The Dark Corner


The Set-Up


Gun Crazy


Fallen Angel


Angel Face


Touch Of Evil


Detour


The Wrong Man


Criss Cross
The Killing



In A Lonely Place


On Dangerous Ground


Crossfire


Where the Sidewalk Ends


Brute Force
The Sweet Smell Of Success
Night and the City
Thieves Highway
The Lady From Shanghai
14 Hours
The Long Night
Nightmare Alley

Odds Against Tomorrow
Act Of Violence
Crime Wave

They Live By Night
Decoy
The Big Steal
Side Street
Where Danger Lives
Tension
Kansas City Confidential
The Big Combo
Gilda




Note that not all of these films end badly for the protagonist, and not all of them feature femmes fatales — several actually have femmes
that rescue the protagonist, and in one of them the protagonist is
rescued, just as improbably, by Jesus.  But in all of them the
protagonist needs rescuing, in all of them he's lost in a nightmare world that's
existentially different from the world that existed before WWII and he can't, by his own efforts, get out of it. 
Even a film like His Kind Of Woman, which goofs comically on this world, is also recognizing it.

In future posts I'll list some of the films commonly called noir
which I don't think really are, because, though they may reflect to one
degree or another the same existential dread as the true noir,
they don't acknowledge it as a profound and inescapable condition. 
It's almost a spiritual distinction, and therefore hard to
define precisely, but I think it's one worth making.

Chinatown is one of the few neo-noirs that really lives up to the designation.  Its view of the world is truly bleak — a moral maze from which there is no escape.  As with many films noirs there’s an indictment of the political system but also a sense that corruption
is universal, not limited to any one class.  It’s an existential corruption.

The big difference between Chinatown and the classic post-WWII noirs is one of gender perspective.  The post-war noirs were centrally concerned with male anxieties, with the way the world looked from the point of view of a suddenly inauthentic and insecure
manhood.  In them, a man might be ruined by a powerful female, a traditional femme fatale, or he might be saved by good woman, but in both cases the situation was beyond his control.  Chinatown finally took a look through the other end of the telescope, imagining what the general collapse of manhood might mean for women.

As screenwriter Robert Towne has said, Evelyn Mulwray is the only
character in the film who operates out of purely decent motives, trying
to rescue herself and her daughter from the clutches of a rancid,
decayed patriarchy.  The protagonist of the film, private eye
Jake Gittes, is a decent enough fellow but impotent when it comes to
helping, much less saving, her.

We’re not quite dealing with a feminist perspective here — we’re still
looking at the mess from a male viewpoint, assessing the male’s failure
of responsibility rather than exploring the female’s search for empowerment —
but we’re a long way from the phallocentric cry of male bewilderment and pain that
was at the heart of film noir.

Still, the deconstruction of the traditional femme fatale
is very thorough and deliberate, because Evelyn Mulwray is first
presented as a kind of spider woman, with all the generic clues that
used to alert us to the fact that the woman in question was going to be
trouble . . . and that’s how Gittes constructs her.  The big
switcheroo is that Evelyn is in much more trouble than she has the
capacity to cause anyone else, that it’s her father’s fault and that
Gittes isn’t smart enough or strong enough to deliver her from it.

Towne’s conversation with the noir tradition is very elegant and profound.  He goes back, in the film, to 1937, to the hardboiled detective fiction out of which film noir mutated, and deconstructs the “tarnished knight” of that form, locating in him the existential nullity of the film noir protagonist.  Gittes has Phillip Marlowe’s private code of nobility, his commitment to a kind of rough justice, but it’s not enough anymore.  The only real nobility he has left is his ability to recognize the cost of his own impotence.

When his associate speaks the film’s famous last line to him, “Forget
it, Jake — it’s Chinatown,” we know he won’t, we know he can’t.
He lives there now — and somehow, because of his failure, we all do.

The anxious, existentially befuddled male is at the heart of film noir.
Caught in a trap that’s not always of his own making, but almost always
worse than he deserves, he stumbles around in a maze with no
exit.  Sometimes he’s destroyed by a powerful female, against whom
he has no defenses, sometimes he’s saved by a powerful female operating
out of unaccountable charity.  In either case, the situation is
ultimately out of his control, which on some level makes each type of
female equally threatening.

Some people have located the source of this paradigm for male anxiety in the new economic status women achieved by entering the
workforce in large numbers during WWII, but this is a very superficial
explanation for the mythology of noir.  Eddie Muller, probably the best and certainly the most entertaining commentator on film noir, points out that the good girls of the tradition are almost always working girls, while the femmes fatales are almost always looking to get something for nothing, and certainly not a paycheck for an honest day’s work.

The male anxiety embodied in the tradition clearly derives from a
deeper source — the moral discombobulation of war itself, the
spiritual exhaustion this particular conflict induced, and the
inconceivable fact of the atomic bomb which raised moral issues and
created fears that the human psyche was ill-prepared to engage.

The ravaged psyches of Americans in the aftermath of a “good war”, a good war they won, so vividly explored in film noir, in some ways says more about the nature of all wars than any works of art which dealt with the conflict itself.

We can't see the existential dread that informs film noir as simply a product of Europe, an import, even though, as D'Ambra points out, many of the crucial filmmakers in the noir tradition were refugees from the European catastrophes of
the 30s and 40s.  This view wouldn't explain the extraordinary
popularity of the form with American audiences for almost two
decades.  Film noir must
have reflected anxieties buried deep in the post-war American psyche,
aroused by the sheer horrific spectacle of total war on a global scale
and by the unthinkable reality of the atomic bomb.

Lancaster, after all, is the one who gets to put his arms around
Ava Gardner, for which going to Hell seems a small enough price to pay
— and once you start thinking in those terms, you're already caught up
hopelessly in the maze of the noir's dark city.