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

Wyatt), cooks breakfast, domestic routine is depicted as a source of deep discontent for the
husband / father. The protagonist’s meeting with the fashion-model Mona Stevens
(Lizabeth Scott) represents the critical moment in his defiant transgression and at the same
time his possible rescue from a life of self-denial and limitation (in respect of the conflict
that he goes through between his inner desires and his professional and family obligations).
In this sense, film noir not only discarded values marked “American” but more
significantly adduced few examples of meaningful social behaviour in everyday life.
In John Berry’s He Ran All the Way (1951), the film uses the theme of a family
trapped in their own home by hostile outside forces. John Garfield as Nick Robey is
holding the family at gunpoint but he (symbolically) conveys the image of a wounded
animal, of a man who has been rejected by his own family. This particular transgression is
made explicit in other noirs like Double Indemnity, a discontented wife who murders her
husband; The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cora Smith’s marriage means nothing to her
but a boring and restless life, so murdering her husband is a real escape for her; Dead
Reckoning (1947), with Coral Chandler who is keeping her marriage to the crime boss a
secret and so manages to seduce Rip Murdock; or The Lady from Shanghai in which
husband and wife seem to have an odious shared reason for wanting Michael O’Hara
onboard ship.
By emphasising the pressing danger to the family unit, these noirs take the spectator
into the main protagonists’ minds firstly to understand why they want to escape from
frustrating routine in their alienated existence, and secondly to make the viewer feel
sympathetic to their final decisions. The non-traditional representation of the institution of
family in film noir contributes therefore to legitimise individualistic social values, and it
suggests that the husband has laid claim to being the hierarchical head and authority figure
in society. From a feminist point of view, it might constitute a strong reminder that these
women / wives were seeking a new position in the American society of the forties and
fifties. After all, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) of Double Indemnity states it very
clearly that her marriage makes her feel like a caged animal in her husband’s home: “I feel
as if he was watching me. Not that he cares, not anymore. But he keeps me on a leash so
tight, I can’t breathe.” As Sylvia Harvey suggests, the lack of position and personal
accomplishment in traditional marriage leads the noir woman to rebel:
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