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

plots with calculating precision. German cinema also featured classic femmes fatales
before 1940s film noir. Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box,
1929) casts Louise Brooks in the role of Lulu, an enticing and free-spirited girl who seems
to have all men fall under her domineering and yet somehow also naive spell. Even highly
respectable Dr Schön (Fritz Kortner) and his son Alwa (Francis Lederer) find it difficult to
get away from the allure of this femme fatale and are drawn into an inescapable spiral into
tragedy. The whole film is shot deploying a sensual and Expressionist décor (notable work
by cinematographer Günther Krampf) so as to accentuate male sexual obsession and
entrapment.
Another example that immediately comes to mind is Joseph von Sternberg’s Der
Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), starring Emil Jannings in the role of Immanuel Rath,
the middle-aged Professor who becomes infatuated with a nightclub dancer, Lola Lola
(Marlene Dietrich). One night he happens to go to “The Blue Angel” club where Lola
works, and inevitably falls in love with her. In my opinion, this film bears striking
similarities with Lang’s Scarlet Street, analysed in detail in Part IV. In both, conventional
men fall for beautiful women, Kitty (Joan Bennett) and Lola, respectively, and are reduced
to figures of ridicule by these cold-blooded and manipulative femmes fatales. Immanuel
Rath falls short of his strong beliefs and is laughed at behind his back. In both films, the
men are bedazzled by the women’s allure (Kitty first appears in her transparent plastic
raincoat like a bonbon in cellophane; Lola dresses in showbiz outfits, exposing her
shoulders and thighs, merely the promise of sexual availability), and with an energy that
makes the men’s fall not only believable but inevitable. Finally both directors convey the
attitude that those who live by their imagination can become helpless victims of it in a
cruelly realistic world.
Considered by many to be the first film noir, Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third
Floor (1940) demonstrates the most overt influences yet of German Expressionism on
American film noir. This unheralded B-film serves as a good way to show Weimar cinema
taking root in America. Firstly, we have Peter Lorre, as the stranger, the psychopathic male
who brutally throat-slashes his victims, and newspaper reporter Mike Ward (John
McGuire) who is the star witness at the trial of an innocent taxi driver, Joe Briggs (Elisha
Cook, Jr.). Frank Partos writes a script which stresses paranoia and claustrophobia,
especially when we see the stranger lurking in the shadows on the stairwell of the building
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