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

This eccentric torture scene (fig. 110) 105 is actually filmed with high background
shadow – John Alton framing the characters as silhouettes cast in ominous greys. The
technique used is indeed very similar to the one applied by Harry J. Wild in Murder, My
Sweet (fig. 111), mentioned before (p. 45). This scene in an interrogation room opens the
film with extremely contrastive lighting and photography: Marlowe (Dick Powell) is
sitting under a bright light (just like detective Diamond in fig. 110). The two hostile police
interrogators dominate the frame, and from an iconographical angle, it makes Marlowe
even more submissive due to his disempowered position (he cannot see) and the blindfold
further completes this symbolic castration.
Figure 110. The Big Combo Figure 111. Murder, My Sweet
Both the above scenes cast a sense of doom over both detectives. This is the reason
why I believe that the photography and the lighting in these scenes suggest the great odds
against these two noir (anti) heroes. At the same time, these scenes are so contingent on the
personal violence and passion of the characters that Lewis and screenwriter Philip Yordan
can barely maintain the subterfuge of the story as merely another good example of the
extent to which organised crime corrupted postwar American life.
105 This brutal scene has often been compared to Roman Polanski’s nose job on Jack Nicholson in American
neo-noir Chinatown (1974) some twenty years later (Polanski himself appears in the film as a vicious
hoodlum who slices off part of J.J. “Jake” Gittes’s (Jack Nicholson) nose. Although out of the scope of this
thesis, it is worth mentioning that the film director followed the noir tradition, and actually pays homage to
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, especially embodied in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. In
fact, all the events of the film are seen subjectively through J.J. “Jake” Gittes’s eyes. Relevant to the scenes
of the films mentioned in my text above, when Gittes is rendered unconscious with a beating, the film turns
totally black, and then gradually fades back in when he awakens.
378