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

music, combines with images of patrons lost in the hammering jazz rhythms as the scene
rises to reach its climax. The sequence at this waterfront jazz joint, where a black quintet
plays wild bebop, draws on an accurate mise-en-scène with figures spinning just as wildly
as the music itself, with striking close-ups of the musician’s faces. They all seem to provide
a background context for an ever-darkening nightmare transforming Bigelow from an
ordinary man into a victim and soon an obsessed retaliator in his quest to find out the
motive for his imminent death. Finally, Dimitri Tiomkin’s music exemplifies Frank’s state
of mind and mirrors his tragedy, at once an expressionistic vision of Bigelow’s plight and a
diegetic evocation of its informal topos. Integral to D.O.A.’s structure, the jazz club is the
major locus for a network of metaphoric associations, namely those related to jazz, sex and
death.
Figure 44. D.O.A.
One of the most distinctive features of film noir is its construction of gender. By
using central archetypes that differed from classical Hollywood productions (the heroic
male and supportive females), film noir added much more complexity to its range of
characters and its construction of gender hinted at processes of social change out of control.
Jazz clubs were part of that coarse but beguiling underworld where people would come to
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