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

characters of amour fou and their unstable attitude as fugitives vis-à-vis the society make
them classical examples of noir themes. In this regard, Luis Buñuel stresses that:
Mad love isolates the lovers, makes them ignore normal social obligations, ruptures
ordinary family ties, and ultimately brings them to destruction. This love frightens
society, shocks it profoundly. And society uses all its means to separate these
lovers as it would two dogs in the street. (in Lo Duca 1968:44)
Raymond Durgnat had already provided a short description of the fugitive couples
in his “Paint It Black” article, under the category “On the Run”, where he states that:
Here the criminals or the framed innocents are essentially passive and fugitive, and,
even if tragically or despicably guilty, sufficiently sympathetic for the audience to
be caught between, on the one hand, pity, identification and regret, and, on the
other, moral condemnation and conformist fatalism. (Durgnat 1970:46)
Durgnat fails yet to explain that what basically forces the spectator to show
sympathy towards these guilty characters and to identify with the innocent alike is the
personality of most fugitive couples and their mad love, which is over-enthusiastic,
erotically charged, and going beyond sheer romanticism. It could be argued that the
intensity of the relationships in such “love on the run” films is as much romantic as noir.
That said, what is dark about these movies, principally in the context of mainstream
Hollywood, is that one and more often than not both members of the couple die.
Another noir drama directed by Lewis is The Undercover Man (1949), also known
as Chicago Story, 99 as it is just another approach to the subject of organised crime
following the conventions of postwar documentary realism explained above (in the line of
T-Men, Naked City, or House on 92 nd Street). The nature of the unresolved murders in the
film, along with Lewis’s eclectic direction, gives this film a very episodic quality.
Breaking with the usual sensationalist posture of gangster films, The Undercover Man
opens with the following text read by a narrator:
In the cracking of many big criminal cases – such as those of John Dillinger, Lucky
Luciano and Al Capone, among others – the newspaper headlines tell only of the
glamorous and sensational figures involved. But behind the headlines are the
99 The timeframe in the film was changed from Prohibition to the postwar era and the city of Chicago
practically became an unnamed big city. The film is based on the story of how the Federal Government
managed to catch Al Capone on income tax invasion.
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