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

discover their susceptibilities to vice and temptation. Out of the Past traces the course of
these fundamentally different visions of gender relationships and simultaneously references
the uncertainty of dealing with race, as Jan B. Wager notes:
(...) the film’s [Out of the Past] ambiguous treatment of race serves as a model. (...)
the male protagonists in classic film noir often exhibit a familiarity with black
culture that lends them an additional air of hipness. (Wager 2005:57)
This is clearly noticeable when Jeff (Robert Mitchum) goes to a black jazz club to
investigate Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer) for Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). Jeff gets
introduced to Kathie’s former maid, Eunice (Theresa Harris), and her companion (Caleb
Peterson), through a black man who introduces Jeff as a friend of his (fig. 45). The whole
scene is played out with no stand-offishness or any type of condescension, but it does offer
a casual comment on racial segregation. The setting of the black jazz club is clearly
suggestive of the notion of jazz as being the music that was promoted by black bands in the
early decades of its development. This passage is thus a good example of the kind of
investment that jazz made in the twenties and thirties involving the white community in
black culture: “The entrance of the white man into jazz at this level of sincerity and
emotional legitimacy did at least bring him, by implication, much closer to the Negro” (in
Gabbard 2004:31).
As with several other scenes from noirs, white culture seems to keep its distance
and shows a lack of interest in the political and racial issues which the locale and music
might be thought to raise. In the majority of noirs from the forties black characters did not
have significant roles, and in most films only appeared as secondary figures, as in the case
of the black man who carries Walter Neff’s bags or washes his car in Double Indemnity. In
this particular scene, Jeff is the only white person on the stage and the black patrons of the
club seem to ignore him until when he takes a seat at Eunice’s table. It would be fair to say
therefore that film noir is largely concerned with the malaises of the urban white male
(black men perhaps had more concrete hurdles to overcome). In many other noirs, the
white protagonists – either male or female – work in nightclubs as singers, as is the case of
Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake) in This Gun for Hire, or as dancers, with Gilda (Rita
Hayworth) in Gilda and musicians or composers, as for example Martin Blair (Dan
Duryea) in Black Angel or Lily (Ida Lupino) sitting at the piano in Road House (1948).
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