Nino Frank was born in Barletta, in the southern region of Apulia, a busy port town on Italy's Adriatic coast.
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 is often given credit for coining the term "film noir" to describe a group of American drama films that were shown in French theaters in the summer of 1946: John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, Otto Preminger’s Laura, Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, and Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window.
Frank's article listed "… rejection of sentimental humanism, the social fantastic, and the dynamism of violent death" as being obsessive French noir themes and called attention to the American proclivity for "criminal psychology and misogyny".
[3] Frank and Chartier's use of the term "film noir" may have been inspired by Gallimard's series of "hard-boiled" detective and crime fiction books called the Série Noire, which included both translated works by American writers and books authored by French writers that were modeled on the US crime novel style.