“When I went to see films in the ’40s,” the New York born-and-raised director Martin Scorsese recalled in a BBC interview, “I saw what was supposed to be New York City on film. However, in actuality what I was seeing was a back lot. Everything was fake; the streets were too clean, the curbs were too high, it had to be California. But in a sense it was New York to me, it was almost more real than the New York that I lived in was.”

Ever since the teens, when most of the American film industry abandoned New York in search of freedom from East Coast production trusts and inconsistent weather, New York City has been the center of an aesthetic tug-of-war pitting New York’s endlessly photogenic but unpredictable locations against the safer Hollywood equivalent that so beguiled Mr. Scorsese as a child.

Starting today, Film Forum II will present NYC Noir, a five-week compendium of crime films set in New York. The Film Forum program spans 80 years and 46 films, some shot in New York, some shot on the tall curbs and clean sidewalks of a Los Angeles back lot. NYC Noir doesn’t just present both New York playing itself and Hollywood standing in, it provides the one thing that has eluded the term Film Noir since it was coined in the mid 1940s — unity.

Loath as I am to bandy about a French term to describe a German-influenced American artistic phenomenon, the so called “film noir” picture — a strain of fatalistic, shadowy crime films singled out by Gallic cinematic gourmands when the cultural flood gates that held back five years of Hollywood movies opened again in 1946 — is tailor made for New York. If ever there were a city, real or mocked up, that leant itself to crime stories, ours is it.

Film Forum II’s retrospective begins today with British director Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 film “Sweet Smell of Success,” a movie of blistering cynicism that boasts some of the purplest dialogue ever to emerge from the typewriter of blacklistee screenwriter Clifford Odets. “One of the characteristic aspects of New York,” Mackendrick wrote decades after the film’s frantic shoot, “is the neurotic energy of the crowded sidewalks. This was, I argued, essential to the story of characters driven by the uglier aspects of ambition and greed.” Filming in the chaos of Times Square during rush hour while New York’s finest physically restrained Tony Curtis’s fans behind police barricades just off screen, Mackendrick and his cinematographer, the great James Wong Howe, infused the exteriors in “Sweet Smell of Success” with a manic intensity that ultimately plays a reassuring counterpoint to the characters’ mutually assured destruction.

But Edward Montagne’s 1950 “The Tattooed Stranger,” an underseen rough-cut gem of a policier, may be the polar opposite of the big curb back lot New York. Shot on a shoestring, the film’s cool and clinical evolving procedural was decades ahead of its time. Though the real star of “The Tattooed Stranger” is the city’s park system — photographed in all its body-dumping glory — look closely during the film’s early crime lab scene and you’ll see future “Hawaii Five-0” star and then recent NYU graduate Jack Lord in an uncredited role.

There has probably never been another filmmaker with more first-hand experience with New York’s neurotic energy than former New York Evening Graphic reporter turned writer and director Samuel Fuller. Despite being shot almost entirely on California sets and Los Angeles locations, his 1953 film, “Pickup on South Street,” is one of 1950s cinema’s most vivid evocations of New York street life.

But the film’s successful replica of ’50s Manhattan’s gutter-level corridors of the powerless pales in verisimilitude when compared with producer Mark Hellinger’s 1948 big screen version of “The Naked City.” Director Jules Dassin’s incomparably evocative use of the same Lower East Side streets on which he grew up is masterfully kinetic. It also proved to be poignant, as within a few short years, Dassin would be forced to take up residence abroad, just a few steps ahead of the blacklist.

By the 1970s, the postwar crime film’s Germanic fatalism had given way to an increasing emphasis on the grim realities of city living. “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three,” directed with breathless expediency by Jersey City-born Broadway actor-turned-TV director Joseph Sargent (born Giuseppe Sorgente) in 1974, is the ultimate love letter to New York. Working from a screenplay adaptation by “1776” and “Sweet Charity” book writer Peter Stone, Sargent, the cinematographer Owen Roizman, and the editor Gerald Greenberg (the latter two veterans of the “French Connection”) pitched a violent and funny hostage caper with the cynical irreverence of a vintage Jimmy Breslin column and the relentless energy of an early James Bond film.

Even Mr. Scorsese’s uncompromising and hugely influential ’70s crime masterpiece “Mean Streets” was shaped by both New York and Los Angeles gravity. Appearances to the contrary, much of the paradigmatic NYC Noir director’s breakthrough film was actually shot in Los Angeles.

“It’s all bulls— except the pain,” says Harvey Keitel’s Charlie in “Mean Streets.” No matter how tall the curbs or clean the sidewalks, big screen New York either captures the pain, loneliness, anger, anxiety, risk, and triumph of the city living or it doesn’t. The pictures in Film Forum’s NYC Noir retrospective not only romance that unique homegrown pain, but successfully exported it to the rest of the world with style.

Through August 30 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).