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

In the same way, we find productions, like John Brahm’s The Lodger (1944) and
Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard (1944) which, although very close to the noir cycle, are
productions characterisable as “Victorian or Gothic films”, “atmosphere films,” or “period
melodramas”. They are just as concerned with the decay and corruption found in typical
contemporaneous film noir. In terms of characterisation, the period film “readjusted” the
fatal quality of women that emerged in the femme fatale in the noir film to be a fatal
propensity to arouse the murderly psychotic in men.
The Lodger was originally based on a novel by Marie Belloc-Lowndes, and was
adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, who made it an early success in 1927. Hitchcock’s version is
about an innocent man who is suspected of being a serial killer (in the lineage of the
Hitchcockian “wrongly accused man”), whereas John Brahm’s presents Laird Cregar
(Slade, in this film) as the leading suspect in a string of murders, a perverse character
obsessed with beautiful women, whom he murders out of a twisted sense of revenge for his
brother and his betrayal by a ruinous woman. John Brahm’s success with this initial period
production prompted another film utilising the talents of both Laird Cregar and The Lodger
screenwriter Barre Lyndon. Hangover Square (1945) is Brahm’s melodramatic vision of
controlled chaos and romantic destruction. From a novel by Patrick Hamilton about a
young composer, whose lapses of memory conceal the fact that he is a mentally disturbed
murderer, Lyndon and Brahm produce a treatment of the mind of an artist unable to master
his own sense of inadequacy. Hangover Square becomes a frenetic, almost explosive
nightmare, which ends in the artist’s transfigured death amid crumbling debris and
enveloping flames. The film is a baroque set-piece and follows the type of filmmaking that
parallels the noir sensibility, but without its disciplined modernity.
Ulmer’s film Bluebeard presents a similar story. This time mad Gaston Morel (John
Carradine) plays the role of a fine-looking but gloomy painter and puppeteer who strangles
his models with a black tie (fig. 95). The scenes this time, however, take place in
nineteenth century Paris, with beautiful images of the Seine, into which the murdered
young female bodies are dumped by the criminal. We learn in the film that Gaston kills
women in order to preserve his artistic creativity but does so under a psychotic compulsion
he cannot control. This perverse take on misogyny from Morel’s contradictory character
shows another part of his idealising act of representation in painting. He gets frustrated and
infuriated by the minor imperfections of his source / models (this might remind the viewer
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