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

uildings and stumbling down alleyways, and reduces him to a black outline, constricted
and redirected by an impersonal cityscape. Another film that continues a liberal-left
critique of capitalism and which typifies the frenzied, post-atomic-bomb Los Angeles of
the fifties is the already-mentioned Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, as a wider allegory of a
society that is about to be destroyed. Aldrich’s World for Ransom (1954) is another war
portrait made about a nuclear physicist Sean O’Connor, who is kidnapped so that his
knowledge may be sold to the highest bidder among various competing nations (he is one
of the only men in the world who knows how to detonate the H-Bomb). “The nihilism
underlying these two films”, as Dickos notes, “generates the ultimate noir perspective in
all of American cinema: the impulse toward heroic self-definition becomes a presumptuous
exercise in a world reeling further away from a recognizable moral center toward
destruction” (Dickos 2002:131).
Henry Hathaway’s The Dark Corner (1946) is the prototypical reflection of
postwar malaise in film noir incarnated in Galt’s (Mark Stevens) total alienation and
hopelessness, captured in his cry of existential anguish: “I feel all dead inside. I’m backed
up in a dark corner and I don’t know who’s hitting me” (see fig. 33). Cyril Endfield was
also blacklisted for his committed social and political views and his film Try and Get Me
(1950) delivers a message of social conscience about the way mob violence operates to
engineer the inevitable destruction of a man, Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy), hopelessly
lost in his own society. Needless to say, the parallels between congressional Red hunts and
the exploits of a frantic lynch mob were underscored in this film, and so Endfield
subsequently had to leave the country and work in British crime cinema.
In conclusion, these films managed to underline the fear that was now the most
abiding preoccupation of American society, with the advent of the atomic and then the
hydrogen bomb, plus the perceived threat of a communist invasion. Although a good
number of mainstream films continued to insist that all was well in postwar America, at the
margins, many of the fifties noirs, especially in the wake of the HUAC, appeared to want
to reflect a more unsettling scenario, creating a climate of dread and paranoia.
I have identified in this body of movies the noir sensibility that is sometimes
associated the postwar malaise which I will examine in the section entitled “Postwar
Readjustment”. One could well apply the suggestion of Douglas Kellner that “films take
the raw material of social history and of social discourses and process them into products
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