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

In this group of films, the bleak and fearful narrative of the postwar protagonist
differs slightly from the trends that followed early noir productions by the end of the
forties. By then, the maladjusted veteran was not a relevant figure anymore and was
substituted by the rogue cop (another figure trained to kill), but an equally subverting
social force. However, according to Lee Horsley and David Goodis, these noir narratives
are normally structured around an opposition between “home” and “wandering”, in which
the displaced central character moves about in a reckless manner without the family
references that are usually present in a social context. These protagonists become then not
only victims of the war but are also socially excluded. Their plight is less to do with the
frantic search for some way out of an economic stalemate than with an irremediable sense
of exclusion. The former may see home as an intangible or an inaccessible place, whereas
the latter returns from the war in apparent peacetime to discover the corrupt and feral
nature of the American society itself. This is the theme of Robert Montgomery’s Ride the
Pink Horse (1947), in which an ex-GI known only as Gagin (Robert Montgomery), a man
devoid of identity, travels to San Pablo, a rural New Mexican village, to avenge the death
of his old war time buddy. Home is completely unreachable for “the man with no place”,
as the villagers refer to Gagin.
The concept of “wandering” is different in the case of Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone
Power) in Nightmare Alley, released in 1947 too, and which shows the rise and fall of a
con artist man working for a seedy travelling carnival. The movement of their narratives
seems to be similar, that is, getting away from something but for different reasons. One can
be the victim of social misunderstanding and discrimination, while the other feels that
society is incapable of establishing a social bound with him again, and regards him with
distrust. In both cases, though, as Horsley concludes, the protagonists function as
scapegoats for exposed dishonesty as they are supposed to compensate for some societal
responsibility or any wrongdoing they were (socially) forced to commit. In either context,
these protagonists are referred to as the “damaged men” or the “wronged men”, for the
different reasons given above, and their existential awareness, loneliness and dread are
crucial qualities of film noir.
There is a third group of films which portrays a similar thematic - at least at the
level of “damaged men” – but which this time shows ex-veterans of war loathing criminals
and conducting vendettas against them. Where the Sidewalk Ends is a 1950 Otto Preminger
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