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

oth in these French productions of the late thirties and the American movies so newly
arrived in France.
Section 1 is concluded with an analysis of the so-called American Expressionism in
films. I seek to explain how the cycle of horror films produced by Universal Studios in the
early thirties (launched by the American Tod Browning’s Dracula and the British James
Whale’s Frankenstein) was also a key influence on the studio’s noir productions, starting
with Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944). During
his Hollywood career, James Whale, a man with a great feeling for Gothic forms, directed
(and sporadically produced) about twenty movies, most of them for Universal Pictures. He
attained his international renown with Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932),
The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). These films will be
discussed in this section, along with those of Val Lewton (specifically, Cat People (1942)
and The Leopard Man (1943)), as they constitute a whole series of visually distinctive and
high aesthetic quality productions, which, in turn, helped to create an innovative bridge to
film noir.
I believe this first section serves the useful purpose of comprehending the amalgam
of varied cultural and literary circumstances that were around at the inception of the noir
phenomenon, even if “cultural history is too diffuse to allow for clear casual relationships;
the most it can attempt is to establish a chain of plausibility” (Maltby & Craven 1995:38).
It is crucial then to acknowledge the extent to which noir was the product of a variety of
forms and pressures rising both from within and from outside the Hollywood cinema of the
forties.
In Section 2 I further contextualise film noir, this time from a social and political
viewpoint. I demonstrate that film noir also contains visible signs of the detailed conditions
of production and reception of the forties and fifties period, during which the American
film industry experienced an ongoing and deep transformation. Once the last menaces to
the return to peace became less apparent, an intense anti-communist campaign set in after
the war and represented the most long-lasting obsession of American society. This
particular period in the United States is known as the Second Red Scare, and is commonly
associated with “McCarthyism”. The climate of fear and paranoia in American society, the
Cold War against Communism, and the threat of nuclear destruction are often reflected in
13