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

Consequently, in the fifties, we start to see the way that organised professional criminals
manage to battle and overcome the police forces. In turn, the authorities are often embodied
by corrupt and rotten agents, as in The Asphalt Jungle, Where the Sidewalk Ends, On
Dangerous Ground, and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, as the quotation above suggests.
Although the narrative structure of these semi-documentaries tends to be different from
most noirs, they remain noir in their opposition to the faceless efficiency of the law officers
and they demonstrate their exposure of corruption at a high social level. These films,
especially Where the Sidewalk Ends, are noir as they detail the exploits of not so powerful
heroes involved in a deeply corrupted society.
Alfred Welker and Anthony Mann’s (Mann is uncredited on this film) He Walked
by Night (1948) is of particular interest to explain the combination of both the conventions
of the semi-documentary / police procedural and the more expressionistic tendencies of the
tough / psychological noir thriller. The film uses real-life actions (the first scene of fig. 51
shows Officer Hollis, in the role of a patrolman on his way home from work, who has been
shot and mortally wounded and is lying against his car), together with other semidocumentary
realist strategies, such as the detailing of codified police work and the
authoritarian voiceover. The story concerns Ray Morgan (Richard Basehart), an
undetermined electronics expert who has become a psychopathic loner. Morgan is a
troubled, powerful individual who sets himself in opposition to the forces of social law by
manoeuvring for his own ends using the same technological skills which the police rely
upon. The scenes below (fig. 51) featuring Morgan (second column) stand in contrast to
the bland compositions and fully realist lighting which characterise the sequences devoted
to police activity. Morgan’s psychotic disturbance is particularly enhanced by the
emphatically noir chiaroscuro lighting, compositional imbalance and low-angled camera
set-ups. The last scene depicts Morgan in an impressive chase, seeking refuge in Los
Angeles’s cavernous network of storm drains. John Alton’s extensive back lighting and
rich deep blacks make the tunnels both creepy and strangely futuristic, suggesting that
Morgan is a creature from another world and anticipating the “alien” antagonists of early
fifties cinema. The mise-en-scène of the police scene, however, with the police officer
looking at his watch, signifies stability, order, the rigid control of individualistic impulses.
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