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

Crime, violence and the modern American city were all present in the gangster
films that burgeoned in the early thirties and which could not help but pave the way for
film noir later on. The classic gangster film trilogy Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy
(1931), and Scarface (1932) was seminal in the representation of the subversive image of
the gangster, and certainly defined the genre: iconically, from fast cars to luxurious fedoras
and “fancy molls”; in narrative terms, the gangster as the modern entrepreneur and his
story of immediate rise and inevitable fall; visually, with conventional studio (and for the
majority) interchangeable settings and flatter lighting backgrounds. In acknowledging
gangster films as a genre and the profound influence they exerted on film noir, I
discriminate them from noir movies as the latter are more self-conscious and more
versatile in their storytelling patterns and more diverse in their lighting techniques, in their
use of chiaroscuro, for example. The authentic physical maze of the noir city does not have
the same heightened presence in gangster films. The gangster is often a public figure who
moves about in the neutral places of the city with a kind of low profile realism, whereas the
doom-laden noir hero is generally a denizen of the mundane world of the city, which only
occasionally collides with the more fantastical world of organised crime.
The Gothic legacy is presented as the other large tradition of “blood melodrama”
which was just as significant in generating the noir style. Dark mysteries related to the
supernatural sphere and depicting psychological horror were often present in the English
Gothic romances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto (considered as the forerunner of the type) to the works of Ann Radcliffe
and Mary Shelley with her novel Frankenstein, the influence of the genre would later be
noticed in certain conventions of noir period films such as Gaslight (1944) and The Spiral
Staircase (1946), or in Robert Wise’s The House on Telegraph Hill (1951). These films
were indeed seemingly modelled on the Gothic novels which would often portray lively
young women, usually in the role of governesses or new brides. As a rule, they ended up
living in labyrinthine ominous mansions peopled by odd servants and feeling attracted to
the enigmatic good looking men of the house.
The central enigma in the Gothic plot is normally constructed around the figures of
husband and wife, in which the husband bears a malicious anger towards his spouse. These
settings and their symbols would later be exploited in noir productions, with Hitchcock’s
Rebecca (1940) standing as the classic example. In fact, in the noir inflection of this type
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