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

from his own actions. Hence, I have first identified the professional detective, the man who
tries to reinstate order (and in so doing to validate his identity), such as the case of private
detectives played by Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.
Then, I have described the homme fatal who clearly wants to get away with his
“standard” existence even if that means that he has to die. As seen in the case of The Dark
Corner, Bradford Galt is the private eye hero who seeks to escape from his social
commitments and ends up being stripped of any sense of triumph. His mixture of shrewd
and calculating charm is often combined with rooted sexual sadism and therefore
frequently found in the Gothic noirs, for example Gaslight, Experiment Perilous (1944)
and My Name is Julia Ross (1945). The homme fatal also regularly shows signs of sexual
perversity: the relentless and obsessive investigating officer, Lt Ed Cornell (Laird Cregar),
in I Wake Up Screaming (1942), the well-dressed Alexander Grandison (Claude Rains) in
The Unsuspected (1947) and fraudulent radio personality Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb)
in Laura. All of these three male protagonists are portrayed as being gripped by a sexual
obsession, which can either be repressed (for example, Grandison’s appetite for death and
deception is fed by his radio mystery programmes) or deviant (Lydecker’s dandified
effeminacy). Finally, the homme attrapé can either be the hero, usually with the help of a
woman, who becomes engaged in either an obstinate or an unintentional transgression of
the law (Al Roberts in Detour and Bart Tare in Gun Crazy) or the hero in a position of
obvious inadequacy in relation to the criminal connivers and to the police, and tries to go
back to a position of security. These are the cases of Lt. Sam Lubinsky in The Killers or
Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt, for example.
In a period of film history that was heavily censored, film noir managed to question
the whole concept of masculine adequacy, showing evidence of a crisis in masculinity and
offering a way of perhaps restructuring and consolidating male identity. The prototypical
malaise in these noirs strips these male protagonists of any sense of control over those dark
forces afflicting them. The number of traumatised or castrated males in these films cannot
be reconciled with the representation of traditional male images, and is clearly evidence of
some kind of “crisis of confidence” in masculinity.
188