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

III. Noir Thematics
1 Essential Elements in Film Noir
Of late there has been a trend in Hollywood toward the
wholesale production of lusty, gut-and-gore crime stories,
all fashioned on a theme with a combination of plausibly
motivated murder and studded with high-powered Freudian
implication. Of the quantity of such films in vogue, “Double
Indemnity”, “Murder, My Sweet”, “Conflict” and “Laura”
are a quartet of the most popular which quickly come to
mind (…) This quartet constitutes a mere vanguard of the
cinematic homicide to come. Every studio in town has at
least two or three similar blood-freezers before the camera
right now, which means that within the next year or so movie
murder – particularly with a psychological twist – will
become almost as common as the weekly newsreel or
musical. (Shearer 1945:7)
This quotation makes two central assertions regarding film noir: that it is “a trend
(…) with high-powered Freudian implication” and the “vanguard of the cinematic
homicide.” To begin with, film directors of the forties and fifties did not know that they
were making noir films. They would probably have called their productions crime thrillers
but incontestably, as the French instantly noticed once these films were screened in postwar
France, they were a vanguard. These films reflected a considerable change in the American
psyche, very different from what the Europeans were used to seeing from the thirties. As
for the “quartet” the quotation mentions, Curtis Bernhardt’s Conflict (1945) should be
substituted by The Maltese Falcon, as although they both portray an uncommon mystery
investigated by Humphrey Bogart, it was the latter that played a more determining role in
the coinage of the term “film noir” by French cineastes.
Shearer further affirms in his article that these crime films were “homicidal” and
“lusty” and filled with “gut-and-gore crime”, a judgement that might surprise modern
audiences. He does not say that the major studios, Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox,
MGM and Warner Bros generally consigned their “crime films” to B-units and released
them on the bottom half of double bills. The other majors – RKO, Universal and Columbia
– were often more enthusiastic to show them off and valued them more. For the first group,
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