Nino Frank

Nino Frank (born 27 June 1904 in Barletta, Italy − Paris, 17 August 1988) was an Italian-born French film critic and writer who was most active in the 1930s and 1940s. Frank is best known for being the first film critic to use the term "film noir" to refer to 1940s US crime drama films such as The Maltese Falcon, although research indicates that the term was used in French film reviews and newspaper articles in 1938 and 1939.

Nino Frank was born in Barletta, in the southern region of Apulia, a busy port town on Italy's Adriatic coast.

In the late 1920s, Frank was a supporter of the Irish writer James Joyce, along with a circle that also included Moune Gilbert, Stuart Gilbert (who helped to make the French translation of Ulysses in 1929), Paul and Lucie Léon, Louis Gillet, and Samuel Beckett. In 1937, Frank conferred a great deal with Joyce about the Italian translation of Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle.

During the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France, Frank wrote for the collaborationist weekly Les Nouveaux Temps, but he was known as a critic of the collaborationist Vichy government’s censorship policies. He also wrote for the French film magazineL’Écran français, a socialist-leaning magazine founded by the Resistance during the war, which continued after it. The magazine had the backing of French film directors such as Jacques Becker, Marcel Carné, Jean Grémillon, and Jean Painlevé; writer/scenarists Pierre Bost and Jacques Prévert; critics Georges Sadoul and Léon Moussinac; as well as Albert Camus, Henri Langlois, André Malraux, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. L’Écran français was a “serious publication”; in contrast to other film magazines with their “cheesecake” photos and star gossip, L’Écran français was printed on yellow paper and carried articles on a range of film criticism issues written by critics and notable figures from French cinema. Frank eventually rose to the position of Editor-in-Chief of L’Écran français.

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