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

Figure 45. Out of the Past
Non-diegetic jazz soundtracks in noirs were also particularly distinctive, such as in
Siodmak’s Criss Cross with the frenetic chords of Miklós Rózsa’s 61 score yielding to the
dance music from within the club, or Max Steiner’s score for Mildred Pierce. Many
musicians and critics think that it is possible to talk of “jazz noir”. Commercially speaking,
people identify Hollywood film noir jazz with the “Cool Jazz” period (essentially from the
fifties onwards) from the West Coast, and with names such as Miles Davis (1926-1991),
Gil Evans (1912-1988) or Gerry Mulligan (1927-1996).
Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady, a film based on one of the “pulpiest” novels of
Cornell Woolrich and which is said to have raised the Hollywood profile of Siodmak, also
has for its main locus a jazz nightclub. This is where Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis), a
61 Miklós Rózsa was a Hungarian composer and was regarded by many as one of the “founding fathers of
film music”. In the twenties, he embarked on a career as a serious classical composer and in the forties
moved to California. Still today, Rózsa is viewed as having virtually invented much of the musical language
of film noir.
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