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

ealm of near-explicit sexual metaphor. This is a famous sequence with Elisha Cook, Jr.
playing the jazz drummer, wherein Ella Raines is all dolled-up and disguises herself as a
prostitute to track down and seduce Cliff in order to get the information she and her
employer need about the “phantom lady”. In the next couple of angles below (fig. 48),
director Siodmak gives maximum power to his expressionistic mise- en-scène in one of the
most striking scenes of film noir. The scene is concluded in a drum solo by March that
blends sex and music into a visual paradigm of tension (“the drummer’s masturbatory
playing”) and release (intercutting shots of sweat and rhythm as he struggles at the drum kit
suggesting an orgasmic ending).
Figure 48. Phantom Lady
The little music that the film uses is mostly diegetic. It was the intention of the
director deliberately not to employ music, which then causes an even greater impact vis-àvis
the spectator when we do hear it and are invited to understand the story through its
implications and characters’ moods. It is believed that the fact that half of Phantom Lady
was devoid of sound effects, essentially Siodmak’s sparing and eccentric approach to
sound and music, contributed greatly to the film’s overall success. In the novel, Woolrich
describes the setting of the music as “hellish” and he establishes the jam session as a “sort
of Dantesque Inferno”. He uses this episode to capture the dangerous eroticism of both
drugs and jazz in his own distinctively tense prose style:
The next two hours were sort of a Dantesque Inferno. She knew as soon as it was
over she wouldn’t believe it has actually been real at all (...). It was the
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