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

one lit by J.J.’s match. “You’re not superstitious, are you, Chris?”, to which Cross nods,
yet the camera effectively pans down on a single shot (like an insert) and shows him
crossing the fingers of his right hand (his hidden, crossed fingers as one of many visual
plays on his name), emphasising the strong psychological elements of the unfolding story.
For the first time in the film the word “superstitious” is brought forward and the viewer
gets to know about Chris’s superstition feelings, which foretell his fatal situation and
therefore his self-condemnation.
He and his colleagues watch through the window to see their boss stepping out with
a young attractive woman – not his wife – and the camera soon focuses on Chris who
seems to be wrapped up in a fantasy world. This scene stresses how embarrassed Chris is
by the erotic (while all the clerks rush to the window for a glimpse of J.J.’s mistress, he
takes a furtive look, and gently withdraws as the younger men start to comment on their
boss’s sexual activity). Simultaneously, the scene is almost like hindsight, presaging that
blind love and desire for a woman who will transform him into a tortured, guilt-ridden
murderer. Thus, oneirism 82 gradually becomes a visual motif, especially later in the film, to
reveal the fear and paranoia engulfing the main character. Moreover, the deep focus used
in these scenes brings to mind Roland Barthes’s system of denotation and connotation. The
depth of focus in which the saddened Cross is removed from the main scene (the group of
his colleagues) opens up the temporal and spatial dimensions of the shot.
Cross leaves the room with one of his colleagues and decides to walk for a while
instead of taking the underground, as he always does, homeward-bound for Brooklyn. His
deviation from routine functions as an omen about how much fate and “the web of
circumstances” can mean in his life, accentuating this aspect of noir sensibility. As it is
raining hard, Chris insists upon sheltering his colleague to the bus stop under his already
torn little umbrella (again a metaphor of his foredoomed life). “Say, hey, Charlie…you
suppose J.J. is running around with that young lady?”, asks Chris while standing
(ironically) in front of a jewellery store. Charlie (Samuel S. Hinds) just replies: “It looks
that way”. Then Chris downheartedly, but with aroused interest, adds, stammering again on
the first person: “I-I-I wonder what it must be like ... well to be – to be loved by a young
girl like that. You know, nobody’s ever looked at me like that. Not even when I was
young…” Before Charlie hops on his bus, we are told that Chris is a Sunday painter:
82 Here I would like to recall the idea of the “oneiric” presented by Borde and Chaumeton (p. 163).
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