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

“When I was young I wanted to be a painter. I thought I would be a great painter
someday… so I’m a cashier”. This act of self-definition shows Chris’s split. He is a cashier
after all: his inscribed watch says so.
This unusual and unintended diversion from his normal routine establishes a strong
parallel with another noir production by Edgar G. Ulmer, the aptly named Detour (see p.
83), starring Tom Neal in the role of Al Roberts, which brings to life a down-on-his-luck
nightclub performer who also takes one wrong turn and sees his whole life slowing
descending into fear, blackmail and coercion, prodded along by Vera’s (Ann Savage)
femme fatale. Both films show that departure from routine is a noir narrative trope and they
both typify the noir human condition of the characters as victims of a fate that by nature
they can never outrun.
While winding down the streets of Greenwich Village (the home of bohemians and
artists), Chris Cross stumbles upon an almost theatrically conceived scene of violence – a
young woman (Joan Bennett in the role of Kitty March) being slapped around by a guy,
Johnny Prince (played by Dan Duryea) on a street corner – and runs up to them (Enno
Patalas refers to this scene as a tableau vivant). This street corner can metaphorically
express hope and fatalism at the same time: Chris’s lonely life is about to change “just
around the corner.” A new dimension of optimism lies there –literally on the ground – the
woman who is going to change his life forever, but concurrently there is an air of fatalism
(there lies the sex object woman, temptation fulfilled, who will conduct them both to ruin).
He beats the young man down with his umbrella which serves as a fighting device and as a
shield at the same time. Interestingly enough, his old worn out umbrella, as mentioned
above, again symbolically portrays a man who is also just as torn to shreds and perhaps as
much in (psychological) distress as the woman he sees being (falsely) attacked.
At Tiny’s, they sit down face-to-face, sipping a drink and contentedly listening to
“Melancholy Baby”, a song which is often heard on Kitty’s record player (fig. 72). Lang’s
treatment of sound reverses to a great extent Jean Renoir’s practice in La Chienne and
typically relies, as Thomas Leitch notes, on the “triangular notion of intertextuality in
which the three sides of the triangle are formed by a literary original, a film translation of
that original, and another film that stands in relation to the first two” (Leitch 2002:56).
That intertextuality affirms that the music and soundtracks can hold linguistic elements
together and that language has an impact on all filmic tracks at least virtually. Just the
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