Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

These early Expressionist films, with their anguished protagonists trying to escape
from a disordered society and their stylised urban settings, wielded a profound influence on
the subject matter as well as the visual forms on the American film noir. As many German
directors fled to Hollywood from an ever evolving social nightmare, they brought with
them the special sensibility that flowed throughout their early work. Many of their
productions would then have Expressionist traits, though they were very much adjusted to
the taste of American producers and American audiences. Expressionist elements in film
noir are to be sure not as pronounced as in German films. The world of noir is not twisted
to the degree that it is in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (in fact, rarely does Hollywood cater
for such a painterly aesthetics); but the obscurantism of the characters’ mental activity,
their paranoia as well as their amnesia are part of an identifiable shift that affected
American cinema, regarded by as a reflection of the various social and cultural changes
occurring in the US during the forties. The films contain a battery of Expressionist motifs
that functions as a kind of visual italics, supplying mood and texture and elevating the
stories from their bland, everyday contexts.
A consistent visible trace element of Expressionism throughout noir is the
nightmare sequence, where for a few moments, in a dream interlude, a film becomes
overtly subjective, entering into the hero’s consciousness to portray its disorderliness and
fragmentation. As discussed on p. 45, one of the earliest and best of these Expressionist
nightmares occurs in Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet. Taken as one of the
productions that had a major impact in launching the noir cycle, the film is a captivating
fusion of the hard-boiled tradition and a form of muted Expressionism. It is not just the
psychotic disorder characterised essentially by delusions of persecutions or fear of living in
the world they find themselves in, but also their amnesia that lead the noir protagonists to
enter a world of forgetfulness and total mental prostration.
Another example of this German Expressionist influence on a noir production is to
be found in Arthur Ripley’s The Chase (1946 - see p. 60). The film presents Chuck Scott
(Robert Cummings), a WWII veteran who becomes an impoverished wanderer anguished
by mysterious dreams, as someone who finds a wallet and decides to return it to the home
of an affluent Miami businessman Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran), who happens to be a
vicious gangster. Scott is then recruited as the new chauffeur for Roman as a token of his
(supposed) appreciation for so much honesty. It does not take long for Scott to discover
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