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

flashback, and the dreamlike almost ethereal presence of Laura sets the noir Freudian tone
of this whodunit story. Detective McPherson, through the testimony of Laura’s friends and
letters, comes to know Laura posthumously and slowly falls in love with the dead woman,
mainly dazzled by her portrait which hangs on the big living room wall over the fireplace
(fig. 60).
From a semiotic perspective, the film contains familiar motifs which will be further
analysed in the next Part. The portrait is indeed the most relevant of these as it embodies
the absent Laura: one night McPherson falls asleep while watching the portrait on the wall
and is suddenly awakened by the sound of Laura who shows up to him like a dream or a
ghost. Similarly to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the portrait here becomes the
analysis of a man’s desire to impose their imaginary visions of idealised femininity onto
women. All three men, especially McPherson during his investigation, are put into a trance
by the enthralling Laura’s enigma and magnetism transmitted through the portrait. The
above scene shows the employment of noir trademarks, beyond the shadowy black-andwhite
cinematography. In the centre of the living-room, the supercilious art critic stretches
his right arm out to the portrait of Laura who has become a personification of his refined
aesthetic ideals. The meaningful look that he gives McPherson emphasises how much he
himself is a self-centred man, despising McPherson’s “muscular and handsome” (his own
words) physicality and establishing the link between the portrait of Laura (appropriately
painted by Lydecker) and the fascination McPherson feels for Laura, who may be just a
figment of his imagination. All these subtexts constitute an interesting theme of the image
and raises questions about the role of the movie and the spectator as prone to similar
fixations.
One year later, in 1945, Otto Preminger brings back Dana Andrews to star, this
time as a drifter, Eric Stanton, who is pushed off a San Francisco bus for lack of money.
He lands in Pop’s Eats, a diner where he immediately develops a fondness for a sexy
restaurant waitress named Stella (Linda Darnell) and on whom everybody in town seems to
have a crush. Preminger returns to his familiar territory of moral ambiguity in Fallen
Angel, using Andrews as a personification of indecisiveness: he imagines if he had money
Stella would eventually respond to his advances. He marries the local spinster June Mills
(Alice Faye), as a prelude to a quick divorce and anticipated cash settlement to go back to
his waitress. The moral ambiguity is further stressed when, on learning about his dishonest
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