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

shows a young married couple in a frantic escape from the city to an isolated farm in the
country. In Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) longs to go back
home and back to his childhood farm which he once had to leave behind for a life of
organised crime in the city. In Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, Jim Wilson (Robert
Ryan) plays a New York policeman incapable of controlling his aggressive impulses. This
life has made him bitter and violent so he is sent to a rural community upstate expecting
that a less hectic setting will have a restorative effect. The fruit orchards of Dassin’s
Thieves’ Highway (1949) seem to be no refuge to Nick Garcos (Richard Conte) from
networks of criminal corruption. In Ray’s They Live by Night, two young lovers, Bowie
(Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) attempt to move away from their
established criminal lives, hiding out in farmhouses, cabins, and other rural locations in the
South of the country (indeed, the film is set exclusively in the country, a significant
exception to the majority of noirs). In all these films there is a sense of hopelessness in this
physical / spatial change which, for different reasons, completely takes them into the noir
sphere. At climatic moments of their plots, these movies show that the noir style and the
urban context combine well together, not only in terms of technical effects such as highcontrast
lighting (which suits enclosed spaces with flat walls and artificial light sources, for
example), but also as a way of introducing the urban noir hero, who struggles to survive in
the city but cannot altogether leave it.
The narratives of these films make it clear that such a hopeful ending is rarely an
option, supporting the noir visual treatment of despair and its subversive implications, as
well as the individual journey (both physical -from city to country- and metaphorically –
inner journey) of the noir protagonist. Diverse uses of rurality and small-town life are made
in film noir, hinting at the existence of places of decency and traditional values, but at the
same time it shows how the rural can be drawn into a shelter for criminality. This visual
treatment of the countryside in film noir actually confronts the romantic exaltation of the
rural space as a place of moral integrity and a repository of good values.
Film noir’s perception of the city is strongly rooted in the lower side of modern
urban life and its night-time lonely desperation. In John H. Auer’s City That Never Sleeps
(1953), the metropolis, deploying both a sardonic and sentimental tone as the “Voice of
Chicago”, actually narrates its own tale:
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