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

music’s dissonant potential to stage a jazz sequence in a bar to accompany the shots of Paul
Raden (Albert Dekker) killing the girl in the alley.
This association of jazz with disturbed mental states was made even clearer later in
George Marshall’s The Blue Dahlia, with its inclusion of amnesia, helplessness, and
disillusionment to create the noir mood and the sensibility of the film. In the original
screenplay by Raymond Chandler, the writer asked for Buzz (William Bendix) to be the
real killer, blinded and completely nonreactive to the violent effects of the war. 60 Whenever
he hears jazz music, amnesiac Buzz refers to it as “jungle music”, “the sexually liberating
beat of postwar prosperity”. Appropriately, it was the works directed by Robert Siodmak
that established the triad of jazz, violence and sexuality within the cycle, most memorably
in certain expressionistic interludes in The Phantom Lady, The Killers and Criss Cross.
Interestingly enough too, the type of jazz played in the noirs of the forties is quite different
from the type played in noirs from the fifties (mirroring the differences in the films
themselves, as discussed earlier). In a show of aesthetic synergy, the kind of jazz played in
films like Phantom Lady or The Killers is much more strident in keeping with the mental
states of the characters and the urban violence they live amongst.
The jazz club in Maté’s D.O.A. is a perilous and uninhibited place; it is ultimately
where the protagonist’s murder takes place, and so the music played there is more
aggressive but it fits perfectly with the hero’s fury and act of vengeance. While on a short
break in San Francisco, Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien), a certified public accountant,
visits a sleazy jazz nightclub, “The Fisherman Club”, where a mysterious man with a
striped scarf (fig. 44) poisons his drink. The next day Frank is informed by his doctor that
his body has absorbed “luminous toxin”, an irreversible iridium poisoning. Given only a
few days to live, the doctor shows him a glowing glass tube of luminescent poison and
ominously tells him: “You’ve been murdered!” The basic atmosphere in D.O.A. is
drastically inverted during this scene in the nightclub. Even the music played suddenly
switches to that of a small combo jazz, with no lyrics, in anticipation of what is about to
happen to the main protagonist. The mundane tone of the earlier part of the flashback
abruptly assumes the macabre tenor of what is about to follow. The powerful use of jazz
music, interpreted with tight close-ups of sweating musicians caught up in the fury of their
60 The ambience of Chandler’s hard-boiled novels aroused objections to this film from both Paramount and
the Navy as they considered the novel’s ending to be an insult to the gallant men who had won the war. This
forced Chandler to rewrite the film implicating Dad as the murderer.
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