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

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at the core of the mystery of the film, which is stressed by the fact that she is initially absent from the film (she is spoken of early in the film but is not seen until the story is well advanced). She was placed under contract by Howard Hughes in 1944, and soon after by RKO, where she eventually became one of the studio’s leading actresses and starred with Robert Mitchum in two classic noirs: Tourneur’s Out of the Past (she would appear again in a neo-noir version of the film called Against All Odds by Taylor Hackford in 1984) and Gross’s The Big Steal, and another (minor) noir film entitled They Won’t Believe Me (1947) directed by Irving Pichel and starring Robert Young. Her contribution to the noir cycle may not be that imposing but the term “film noir” normally brings her name to mind on account of her ability to interpret the role of femme fatale. In her own words, Jane Greer recalls: When I first signed at RKO, I darkened my hair. And dark hair makes you look a bit sinister on the screen. Consequently, every part I got was “the other woman”. Finally, I’d been there for years when a producer, Joan Harrison, wanted me for a normal person. RKO said, “She plays a heavy”. But Joan told them I’ll fix it, and she lightened my hair. Suddenly, I looked human. But I did have a hard time moving away from that “other woman image”. (in Fitzgerald 2002:72) Finally, third and perhaps most crucially, actor Kirk Douglas, who had the rare privilege of starting his movie career with a reasonably important part in Lewis Milestone’s noir film The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, where he plays Barbara Stanwyck’s weak husband. In Hollywood, Douglas was instantly stereotyped as an antihero, typically a bully, and frequently a villain. This is the case in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, where he acts as Walter O’Neil, a weakling alcoholic; in Out of the Past, in the role of gambler / mobster Whit Sterling; and then, I Walk Alone (1948), a noir film where he was teamed with Burt Lancaster in the role of Noll “Dink” Turner, the owner of a swanky nightclub during the Prohibition era, and which sets up ideological oppositions: Lancaster is a former criminal but a devoted friend with a code of honour (as a good bootlegger); Douglas, by contrast, is socially correct but untrustworthy and crooked (behind a corporate shield). Douglas has had a full career on screen and became notorious for his sense of independence. His participation in Champion (1949), a true revelation in Hollywood (and often considered a noir film), marked the beginning of the actor’s total autonomy, and in that film he plays Michael “Midge” Kelly, an egocentric boxer. Later in 1951, he acted as 346
Chuck Tatum, a cynical, frustrated journalist who stops at nothing to get back a job on a major newspaper in noir film Ace in the Hole (p. 235). Douglas’s stardom cannot be limited to just this list of films but extends across a distinguished 40-year career. Yet, these examples of noir films allowed him to firm up the tough-guy image that became synonymous with the actor’s screen persona. Most importantly, returning to Out of the Past, the movie is representative of the second phase of film noir’s classic period in the years immediately after World War II, as its leading theme, as I show later, is elaborated out of a sense of a dark, inescapable past. By 1947 films such as Body and Soul, The Locket, Nightmare Alley, and Dead Reckoning (all from 1947) had developed a particularly noirish vision of the antihero being caught in a web of events related to his past. The plot of Out of the Past is especially multifaceted and consequently rather complex. Jeff Bailey runs a gas station in the small town of Bridgeport, California, with the assistance of a mute boy (I will come back to the meaning of “muteness” here), Jimmy (Dickie Moore). In a tender moment by an idyllic lakeside setting, involving Jeff and his fiancée Ann (Virginia Huston), Jeff tells her, through a flashback, that he used to be a New York-based private detective named Jeff Markham. Hired by a powerful racketeer named Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), Jeff is requested to find Sterling’s mistress, Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer), who had shot Sterling and got away with $40,000. Jeff flies to Mexico and falls in love with her and comes to believe her claim that she did not steal any money. They both move to California and live there until Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie), Jeff’s former partner, tracks them down. Kathie kills Fisher and flees, causing Jeff to discover that she had lied about the money. We are then sent back to the present time of the narrative, and we see Jeff assuring Ann that he does not love Kathie anymore. 347
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Joaquim da Silva Universidade de Av
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To Antonio, who made this possible.
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Acknowledgements This long journey
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Finally, I owe a huge debt of grati
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keywords abstract Film Noir, genre,
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2 Social and Political Influences o
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2.4 Joseph H. Lewis................
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Figure 42. Force of Evil ..........
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I. Introduction: Paving the Way for
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term that the film industry itself
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about which films themselves consti
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also, in the films’ fundamental n
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American films after the Nazi occup
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we also find a disruption of the wo
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oth in these French productions of
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Hollywood feature films but it did
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throughout this work); and c) to di
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odies, or as killers and crooks, bu
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these films was to confer on them a
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writer, director, producer, and art
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cinema does not have the power of
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Before working on The Dark Mirror,
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y taking it “from the outside.”
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and many, if not most, films would
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1.1.1 Dashiell Hammett In 1929, Das
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tough appearance, by their occupati
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Apart from “The Continental Op”
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unsettling when for example shootin
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1.1.2 Raymond Chandler Raymond Chan
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Figure 4. The Big Sleep the chaotic
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eleased to the big screen by MGM wi
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most fastidious visions of London i
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hometowns and move into bigger citi
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Double Indemnity started the trend
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has happened, but, as if hypnotized
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destructive, or used by stronger wo
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Tomorrow Goodbye (1950) into a noir
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Home (1937) - were two living proof
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which collapses the distinction bet
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Figure 10. Deadline at Dawn Alex’
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1.1.6 William Riley Burnett Another
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Figure 11. High Sierra The Asphalt
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1.1.7 Conclusions What made the det
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fiction managed to provide for a de
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escalation in illegal drinking plac
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Ben Hecht story and despite being p
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Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?”
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The third originating gangster movi
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part of the recurrent patterns of v
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protagonist of Edgar Ulmer’s Deto
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exemplify in Part III (“Space and
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1.3 The Gothic Romance 87 And trave
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titlecard when the film opens alert
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In Rebecca the beautiful, desirable
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forties. Thematically, the represen
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To complicate this matter further,
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trampled under by war and revolutio
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he says, when Expressionism ended,
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These early Expressionist films, wi
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student, Balduin (Paul Wegener hims
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(Tragedy of the Street, 1927, aka W
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plots with calculating precision. G
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perverted and neurotic sex murderer
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1.5 French Poetic Realism Poetic Re
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(Michèle Morgan), whose godfather
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strikingly atmospheric view of the
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Jean Paulhan, editor of La Nouvelle
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Julien Duvivier’s Pépé Le Moko
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the combination of lighting effects
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peculiar expressionistic lighting a
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Figure 28. Son of Frankenstein This
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Figure 29. Murders in the Rue Morgu
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alienation mixed with nuanced perfo
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2 Social and Political Influences o
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Liberal reforms soon became a spuri
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Polonsky, Jules Dassin, and Edward
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which are themselves historical eve
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Production Code Administration. Thi
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In this particular case, one can se
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Neff: Will you be here too? Phyllis
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against any possible theft of groce
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2.3 Postwar Readjustment If the moo
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In this group of films, the bleak a
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explain, these noir heroes of the f
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(Gilda, White Heat, Scarlet Street,
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seething excitations” and adds th
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Romanticism present at the very hea
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to persist and overcome difficultie
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III. Noir Thematics 1 Essential Ele
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its modernist sensibility, enabled
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Wyatt), cooks breakfast, domestic r
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structures of constituted authority
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1.2 Space and the Noir City Film no
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other people and developing a calcu
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I am the city. Hub and heart of Ame
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1.3 Trouble With Girls: The Femme F
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intelligent and powerful, if destru
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significant discussion of film noir
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Nevertheless, the message is quite
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Another example of the evolution of
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deceiving women. Like many of their
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Either as a femme fatale or an homm
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1.5 Dazed and Confused: The Voiceov
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an impersonal “you” giving the
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of war veterans who, unfolding thei
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1.6 Noir Atmospherics: Cinematograp
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John Alton’s highly stylised phot
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Figure 41. Stranger on the Third Fl
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indoctrination in the movie in the
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in the popular imagination. While t
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1.7 Sounds of the City: Jazz Soundt
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music, combines with images of patr
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Figure 45. Out of the Past Non-dieg
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ealm of near-explicit sexual metaph
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the two, affirming that “Jazz is
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City, Paramount’s Union Station a
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In my analysis of The Big Combo in
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Consequently, in the fifties, we st
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2 Noir and the Film Auteur 2.1 Aute
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noticeably the case, for example, w
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point out the fact that it is only
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elationship to the way a director t
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2.1.1 Billy Wilder Billy Wilder pla
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performance is full of understated
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Figure 54. Sunset Boulevard Wilder
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Figure 55. Ace in the Hole All of B
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2.1.2 Orson Welles He may have only
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For example, in the scene above (fi
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As Leo Braudy in The World in a Fra
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slanting compositions, and brillian
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2.1.3 Otto Preminger Austrian film
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plans, June still shows her love fo
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Figure 61. Where the Sidewalk Ends
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project my viewpoint on the audienc
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postulated as the “doctrine of si
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pouvait espérer sortir de la déno
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I am at the barber's, and a copy of
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certain community, our subjective r
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interpretant” (Stam 1992:6). Here
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The notion of “text” as a disco
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only agree that these disciplines s
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2 The Universe of Motifs and Symbol
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Andrew Sarris once wrote that “If
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exception to this rule, his movies
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independent production companies in
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Figure 66. Double Indemnity In the
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Figure 67. Scarlet Street The symbo
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contorted Expressionistic grimace,
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Figure 70. Metropolis The clock mot
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Figure 71. Strangers on a Train The
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“When I was young I wanted to be
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themselves in the projection of inn
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woman in the portrait throughout I
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scenes as the attachment is purely
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(namely The Spiral Staircase and Ou
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Page 313 and 314: 2.1.1.4 Conclusion All in all, ther
Page 315 and 316: Question: Scarlet Street had the sa
Page 317 and 318: an accepted and well-known screenwr
Page 319 and 320: Siodmak’s next two films for Univ
Page 321 and 322: money from Dundee. A more harrowing
Page 323 and 324: 2.2.1 The Spiral Staircase (1946) a
Page 325 and 326: here increased by the unsteady blac
Page 327 and 328: Figure 83. The Spiral Staircase Thi
Page 329 and 330: Warren, making either of them the p
Page 331 and 332: 2.2.1.2 The “Optical Unconscious
Page 333 and 334: camera is expressive, as it informs
Page 335 and 336: ordering” - appears to match this
Page 337 and 338: eyewitness, but at the same time, a
Page 339 and 340: Figure 87. The Spiral Staircase Bas
Page 341 and 342: While Cross implicitly acknowledges
Page 343 and 344: Figure 89. Affair in Trinidad Other
Page 345 and 346: However, much of this iconography t
Page 347 and 348: long, wooden staircase while trying
Page 349 and 350: Figure 93. The Spiral Staircase Fig
Page 351 and 352: of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The B
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Page 355 and 356: 2.3 Jacques Tourneur Born in Paris
Page 357 and 358: a laughing audience), and broken la
Page 359 and 360: violent mishaps could have led to h
Page 361: writers like Dashiell Hammett (who,
Page 365 and 366: on, Ann, who represents his hope fo
Page 367 and 368: This kind of temporal manipulation
Page 369 and 370: ought forward by the characters of
Page 371 and 372: found Kathie: “I was glad it was
Page 373 and 374: Figure 102. Out of the Past In this
Page 375 and 376: Figure 104. The Lady from Shanghai
Page 377 and 378: Jeff: Give him time. Kathie: You ar
Page 379 and 380: Figure 106. Out of the Past The sce
Page 381 and 382: Gun Crazy, a barrage of police gunf
Page 383 and 384: 2.4 Joseph H. Lewis Considered as a
Page 385 and 386: untold storied of ordinary men and
Page 387 and 388: through windows, to provide the ind
Page 389 and 390: 2.4.1 The Big Combo (1955) and the
Page 391 and 392: of most noir films including The Bi
Page 393 and 394: 2.4.1.1 “First is First and Secon
Page 395 and 396: In The Big Combo the unconscious tr
Page 397 and 398: It is not only in terms of narrativ
Page 399 and 400: Although the idea is not to go into
Page 401 and 402: Figure 113. Scarlet Street Neff’s
Page 403 and 404: 2.4.1.2 The Big Combo and Generic T
Page 405 and 406: and knowing they are both surrounde
Page 407 and 408: As the noir movement entered the la
Page 409 and 410: V. Conclusions: 1 Genre Revisited T
Page 411 and 412: on social aspects through a dramati
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Buscombe is right: if we take a gen
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constructions that make it difficul
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Such factors have been scrutinised
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Thematically, noir films as a group
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While enforcement of the Production
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are “as often nihilistic, cynical
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which is normally not associated wi
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morality brought about by these noi
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It is within this cinematic and cri
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____________ (1994). The Semiotic C
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____________ (1992b). Farewell, My
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E Easthope, Antony (1993). Contempo
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Greenberg, Joel & Higham, Charles (
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James, David E. (2005). The Most Ty
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Malkiewicz, Kris (1986). Film Light
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N Naremore, James (1978). The Magic
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Polan, Dana (1986). Power and Paran
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____________ (2006). Ava Gardner:
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Sullivan, Ellie (1986). Jacques Lac
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Wilson, Edmund (1962). Classics and
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Appendix I: Annotated Filmography T
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Beware, My Lovely RKO 1952. Prod: C
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Christmas Holiday Univ 1944. Prod:
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Dark Corner, The Fox 1946. Prod: Fr
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Framed Col 1947. Prod: Jules Schern
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House on 92 nd Street, The Fox 1945
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Killing, The UA 1956. Prod: James B
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Mildred Pierce WB 1945. Prod: Jerry
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One Way Street Univ 1950. Prod: Leo
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Repeat Performance EL 1947. Prod: A
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Stranger, The RKO 1946. Prod: S.P.
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Unsuspected, The WB 1947. Prod: Cha
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B) Other Relevant Filmography The f
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Last Laugh, The ScreenSound 1924. P
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Appendix II The Motion Picture P
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VIII. Religion 1. No film or episod
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B. By reason of the mobility of fil
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Reasons Underlying the Particular A
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VIII. Religion The reason why minis
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146, 152, 186, 192, 229, 250, 298,
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high-contrast, 11, 46, 172 Highway
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350, 352, 353, 354, 356, 357, 359,
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Walsh, Raoul, 56, 57, 66, 73, 223,
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