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

deceiving women. Like many of their female counterparts, these hommes attrapés reflect a
doomed relationship, either with the women who surround them or even with the kind of
life they lead. The femme attrapée and the homme atrappé wind up together, just as they do
in The Killers, and unlike the other male protagonists in the two films above, the attrapé
couple manages to survive. The convoluted story of Swede’s (Burt Lancaster) involvement
with Kitty (Ava Gardner) seems to typify the fatal couple, contrasting with homme attrapé
Lubinsky (Sam Levene) who marries Lilly (Virginia Christine). The film also uses the
character of the investigator (Riodan played by Edmund O’Brien) who uses the situation of
Swede and Lubinsky to move beyond the boring routine of his job and enter a world of
corruption and chaos. Yet, unlike the private detective characters played by Bogart in The
Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, the investigator in this film as well as in film noir
arouses almost no interest.
There has also been some critical discussion about the mixed signals sent out
concerning masculinity and homosexuality in film noir. Although the Production Code of
the forties did not allow the depiction of homosexuals, many noirs did depict situations or
sequences in which implicitly gay characters were treated with a combination of
disapproval and fascination. In many cases, the subtextual implications of homosexuality
are used in films in which the male characters are either threatening women, or appear as
villains in a hazily defined abnormal context. Many critics have suggested that noir in
general expresses “a certain anxiety over the existence and definition of masculinity and
normality” (in Kaplan 1998:115) and the presence of characters loosely marked as gay or
effeminate represents an intensification of the representation of sexual perversion common
in this film form.
The novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were filled with latently
homosexual protagonists. The insinuatingly weak character of Joel Cairo played by Peter
Lorre in The Maltese Falcon (fig. 38), daintily dressed, crimped hair and perfume, is
clearly effeminate (even more so in the novel where Cairo is referred to as “queer” and as
“the fairy”), but, due to the rules from the Hays Office, this was downplayed considerably.
In many cases, the noir protagonist assumes a role which is undercut by the way he
interacts with other men, by his masochistic attitude towards women, or simply by showing
weakness at key moments. Several noirs adapt different strategies to hint at homosexuality
and to challenge ideas of what constitutes normative masculine behaviour. This is the case
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