Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...
Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ... 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. 306
2.2.1 The Spiral Staircase (1946) and the Gothic Noir Directed by Robert Siodmak Produced by Dore Shary Written by Ethel Lina White Starring Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, Ethel Barrymore, Kent Smith, Rhonda Fleming Photography by Nicholas Musuraca Music Score by Roy Webb Costume Design by Edward Stevenson Film Editing by Harry W. Gerstad As noted in the chapter on “The Gothic Romance” in Part II, the influence of horror films on film noir has been considerable. The Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century established important roots both for nineteenth-century stage melodrama (a theatre of sensational events and heightened emotionalism) and also for the melodramatic strand that continued throughout the twentieth century in both literature and film. The material used in these Gothic and melodramatic novels would focus on the image of a single, vulnerable woman, insidiously preyed upon either physically or psychologically, as a way of appealing to the sympathy of the largely but not exclusively female reader. Such material need not be, but often was, set in the historical past, but it always accentuated the sufferings of the woman in distress. The oppressed heroine is nearly always the central figure of the novel, presented to us as a pensive, lonely, and terrified creature. 307
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Thelma is still in love with the vicious jewel thief Tony Lare<strong>do</strong> (Richard Rober),<br />
who convinced her to live with her aunt and steal her jewels. During the robbery, she<br />
shoots her aunt, but makes it appear an outside job. She then calls Cleve and, although he<br />
suspects her, he decides to remove all evidence which would incriminate Thelma (fig. 81)<br />
and he continues to protect her. In the end, k<strong>no</strong>wing that his life and career are ruined,<br />
Cleve walks off into the sha<strong>do</strong>ws and must from then on bear the weight of his own<br />
mistake.<br />
Siodmak directs with a particular sense for the characters’ romantic desperation<br />
using the bleak lighting by cinematographer George Barnes, and the film comes out with a<br />
quality which is very similar to Lang’s <strong>da</strong>rk, romantic desolation seen above in Scarlet<br />
Street. The film is an intelligent examination of the justice system, the way an individual<br />
can get away with murder and manipulate the system to his or her own ends (the scene<br />
when Thelma is on trial at the court is remarkable with Cleve strategically presenting the<br />
elements of the crime to her advantage).<br />
On the whole, and to conclude, Siodmak’s style is smooth going for long takes<br />
rather than a rapid pace, creating more clever effects that make him stand out as a<br />
European director. It is also true that his style and his movies became slightly less<br />
personal, <strong>no</strong>t to mention that they also got longer and slower over the years, especially<br />
after his peak period of productivity in Hollywood (two or three films a year). One might<br />
mention, for example, Custer of the West in 1967 and the largely negative reaction the film<br />
got from the critics. Yet, for the purpose of the <strong>no</strong>ir movement, Siodmak’s works indicate<br />
the main concerns of the cycle with <strong>da</strong>rkness, cruelty, obsession, and betrayal. He has a<br />
tendency to combine existentialist fatalism with a similarly powerful romanticism,<br />
revealing a profound visual imagination and consistency in terms of thematic obsessions<br />
and the stylistic tropes that eluci<strong>da</strong>te them. All these features generated a body of work that<br />
used both <strong>no</strong>ir’s hard-boiled and its Gothic inheritance. The significant quality of his films<br />
is their intensity and complexity of characterisation, with men and women presented as<br />
alienated and ambivalent figures, chasing illusions, and destroyed by their own desires.<br />
306