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

I am the city. Hub and heart of America. Melting pot of every race, creed, color,
and religion in humanity. From my famous stockyards to my towering factories,
from my tenement district to swank Lake Shore Drive, I am the voice, the
heartbeat, of this giant, sprawling sordid and beautiful, poor and magnificent
citadel of civilization. And this is the story of just one night in the great city. Now
meet my citizens...
The City promptly introduces us to the motifs of self-debasement, disorientation,
and dehumanisation, so typical of the noir cycle, and its stock characters: the exhausted
cop, the fraudulent businessman, the psychotic crook, the conniving wife, or the lovelorn
loser, personified by Sgt Joe (Chill Wills). In the same line of thought about the city, seen
from a nocturnal angle, Nicholas Christopher mentions that “walking through a city like
New York or Los Angeles is like walking through a dream – or nightmare” (Christopher
1997:45), emphasising noir cinema’s central motif as the (night) urban labyrinth in which
the noir hero embarks on a dangerously quest. Alain Silver and James Ursini also conclude
that:
Dream and reality are the touchstones of film noir. Los Angeles is where the
filmmakers of the classic period brought these elements together, created the
emotional conundrums which the noir protagonist must confront - the land of
opportunity and the struggle to get by, the democratic ideal and the political
corruption, the disaffection of veterans who gave up the best years of their lives.
(Silver & Ursini 2005:13)
The process appears to be painful and often convoluted for the noir hero, attempting
to regain a new perspective on city life. In films such as Out of the Past the noir city
contrasts with a redemptive countryside. In On Dangerous Ground, as seen, where despair
is written on the anguished face of Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan), who drives through wintry
countryside in daylight, and the city streets at night. The film is both psychologically
realistic and spiritually mysterious, but clearly reworks the city / country dichotomy,
especially when the character’s emotional state is also expressed through subjective shots
of the road as Wilson drives. Finally, it suggests that the distraught cop is humanised by the
country in a way that he could not be in the city.
The type of criminality and passions that many noir protagonists manifest comes
from the insecurity of (their) existence; at the same time the city is definitely the place to
pursue their obsessions. This resolution can be deeply problematic for the noir character,
but, as Robert Warshow wrote, “there is only the city [for them]; not the real city, but that
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