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

woman) is willing to use any weapon, including (especially) her own sexuality to challenge
male patriarchy, even if that means provoking her own destruction. Powerful and
seductive, these femmes fatales, like Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, or Vera in
Detour (1945), will resort to anything including murder. Interwoven with the wartime
changes in the role of women, I examine the postwar noir thrillers which describe the
problems represented by women who are in search of satisfaction and personal definition,
breaking with the traditional contexts of marriage and family.
Similarly to the different types of noir male protagonists, there are basically three
types of women that appear throughout the noir cycle. The good woman and wife that Joan
Wyatt plays in Pitfall (1948) represents the stifling domesticity of the forties and fifties or,
as I will attempt to show, she is the emblem of deeply set misogyny (the psychology of this
is the castrating female who demonstrates throughout the film that family is rigid and
refuses thus to forgive her husband’s infidelity). The more intimidating (more common)
marrying type who usually substitutes the femme fatale as the source of the hero’s anxiety
and danger is conveniently projected through Bertha Duncan in The Big Heat (1953), for
example. And then there is the femme fatale, whose unconstrained sexuality is indeed fatal
to herself and to the hero in the film noir of the forties, as is the case of Phyllis Dietrichson
in Double Indemnity or Nora Prentiss in Vincent Sherman’s Nora Prentiss (1947). As a
few noirs are explicitly woman-centred, I will also refer to films that contain different
facets of the roles of women in film noir. Some of these women can be regarded as
empowered women, some simply as monsters. In the case of Mildred (Joan Crawford) in
Mildred Pierce (1945) she is not a detective, but she plays the hard-boiled detective’s
counterpart and goes through abuse and beatings similar to those experienced by privateeyes
Marlowe or Spade. Whether Mildred can be considered an emergent heroine of the
forties or not, her daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) plays the prototype of the femme fatale who
raises havoc throughout film noir.
I then move on to the noir non-hero who appears to be trapped in his own fate, in
cities that seem to leave him disorientated. From the private eye in The Maltese Falcon to
the detective in The Big Sleep (1946), both chasing criminals through the dark, rain-soaked
streets of the American city, I explain how the typical hero of film noir constitutes a stark
contrast to the traditional Hollywood hero. These conflicted hard-boiled private eyes were
often morally-ambiguous figures themselves working for the F.B.I. or other government
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