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

Thelma is still in love with the vicious jewel thief Tony Laredo (Richard Rober),
who convinced her to live with her aunt and steal her jewels. During the robbery, she
shoots her aunt, but makes it appear an outside job. She then calls Cleve and, although he
suspects her, he decides to remove all evidence which would incriminate Thelma (fig. 81)
and he continues to protect her. In the end, knowing that his life and career are ruined,
Cleve walks off into the shadows and must from then on bear the weight of his own
mistake.
Siodmak directs with a particular sense for the characters’ romantic desperation
using the bleak lighting by cinematographer George Barnes, and the film comes out with a
quality which is very similar to Lang’s dark, romantic desolation seen above in Scarlet
Street. The film is an intelligent examination of the justice system, the way an individual
can get away with murder and manipulate the system to his or her own ends (the scene
when Thelma is on trial at the court is remarkable with Cleve strategically presenting the
elements of the crime to her advantage).
On the whole, and to conclude, Siodmak’s style is smooth going for long takes
rather than a rapid pace, creating more clever effects that make him stand out as a
European director. It is also true that his style and his movies became slightly less
personal, not to mention that they also got longer and slower over the years, especially
after his peak period of productivity in Hollywood (two or three films a year). One might
mention, for example, Custer of the West in 1967 and the largely negative reaction the film
got from the critics. Yet, for the purpose of the noir movement, Siodmak’s works indicate
the main concerns of the cycle with darkness, cruelty, obsession, and betrayal. He has a
tendency to combine existentialist fatalism with a similarly powerful romanticism,
revealing a profound visual imagination and consistency in terms of thematic obsessions
and the stylistic tropes that elucidate them. All these features generated a body of work that
used both noir’s hard-boiled and its Gothic inheritance. The significant quality of his films
is their intensity and complexity of characterisation, with men and women presented as
alienated and ambivalent figures, chasing illusions, and destroyed by their own desires.
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