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

a laughing audience), and broken ladder rungs are all tropes that further emphasise the
decay and corruption of the film noir sensibility.
Figure 98. Berlin Express
Moreover, the film is filled with ideological messages lying outside the scope of its
apparent narrative (the themes of alienation and isolation are much in evidence). The main
characters stand for each of the national powers that had a presence in occupied Germany
portrayed in the film (the American headquarters of occupied Germany was in Frankfurt).
In fact, there is also a tough-guy voiceover narration by Paul Stewart who again and again
accentuates the film’s ideological message, limiting the spectator to Robert Lindley’s
consciousness and aligning his vision with that of the United States.
Tourneur’s most commercially successful film noir was Nightfall, based on a novel
by David Goodis and starring Aldo Ray as a man (a commercial artist named James
Vanning) who is hunted and trapped between two murderous bank robbers who assume
that he is holding a bag containing $350,000 and the police who believe he killed his
partner, Dr. Edward Gurston (Frank Albertson).The film again uses flashback as a device
to tell this compact story, and on the whole shows a number of important similarities with
Out of the Past: the establishing of a dualism between present and past and between
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