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

structures of constituted authority, and most categorically distanced from law and
propriety.
As I have mentioned in the chapter “The Gangster Film”, in this genre radical
personal accomplishment was negatively depicted in contrast to what made a respectable
society (this was one of the main means of expression that Hollywood used to reinstate the
values of family and legal institutions and to discourage criminal or nonstandard
behaviour). This radical individualism had to be eventually eliminated so as to safeguard
the community values which were gradually being subverted in the early thirties.
Culturally speaking, as seen before, the screen presence of these figures was envisaged as a
potential danger to the reconstruction of social stability. Film noir’s exploration of themes
of radical individualism retained an economic dimension but often blurred it with sexual
fulfilment. This dark moral reversal can be seen as a risk-taking in both form and
substance. While mood dominated noir, rather than plot, as a cinematic category film noir
was constructed around frustrations and fears, psychological chaos and paranoia, all very
often embodied in the troubling experience of defeat. As I said above, film noir worked
against these idealised notions of family, community and public commitment, presenting
rather a dark, apprehensive culture of aggressive opportunism.
Apart from being a remarkable movie from the point of view of narrative technique
(the film is a multiple first-person narration and presents the same events seen from various
perspectives), The Big Clock illustrates the individualism common in American society of
the late forties and fifties. George Stroud (Ray Milland) gets caught in this web of
circumstances and in the predicament of a wrongly-accused man. His ironic search for
himself (he secretly carries out his own investigation) leads him to raise the possibility of
his own moral guilt, and he feels convicted. As his fate appears to close in on him, he turns
a cold eye on his marriage and his job, in both of which he feels trapped. The film
accentuates thus the feeling of instability and precariousness of the normal everyday world,
which is after all one of the core effects of the noir narrative.
It has been emphasised throughout this work that the topic of culpability seems to
invade most noir productions, with protagonists living a fugitive existence in which every
recess brings on terror. Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) is the voice of most noir protagonists
in The Dark Corner. As a private eye, just released from a San Francisco prison where,
after being framed, he has served two years for manslaughter, Galt personifies the
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