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

Gun Crazy, a barrage of police gunfire causes their car to go out of control and crash into
the roadblock.
Jeff cannot escape from his past. In the novel, Jeff says, “They had built my
gallows higher and higher.” Back in Bridgeport, Ann asks Jimmy, Jeff’s mute assistant,
whether Jeff really wanted to go away with Kathie (“Was he going away with her? I have
to know. Was he going away with her?”). The young man nods positively, lying as a way
of letting her free herself from Jeff’s memory and eventually from her past and start up a
new life with patient and dull Jim (Richard Webb) who still loves her. The film ends with
young Jimmy, the Kid saluting the “Jeff Bailey” sign hanging at the gas station door in a
subversive manner (the beginning of the film focussed our attention upon this sign: “It’s a
small world”, “Or a big sign”). The sign serves thus as a metonymy for the dead Jeff and
the muteness of the Kid appositely reinforces the meaning of Jeff’s life, which remains a
secret between the Kid – who represents the narrative itself - and the viewer. The Kid
walks away towards the mountains in the far background, and turns his back on it (fig.
107), with an inexpressible air of grief-stricken confusion, but perhaps as a way of starting
a new life himself.
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