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

morality brought about by these noirs were articulated in many different (though related)
genres.
Durgnat’s article, on the other hand, has also been pertinent to the subsequent
development of film noir as a critical concept. He underlined the idea that noir was
characterised by a tone (rather than rhetoric of affect, for example) and that noirs manifest
a puzzling variety of themes instead of a core unity based upon a particular treatment of
crime. The titles in the list of the films that follows serve to cue in narrative expectations
and to suggest the thematic and tonal similarities among the films:
a) the repetition of ‘key words’ such as ‘street’, in for example, Panic in the Streets (1950),
Street of Chance (1942), Side Street (1950) , Scarlet Street (1952); ‘city’, e.g. The Sleeping
City (1950), Cry of the City (1948), Night and the City (1950); and ‘dark’ and ‘night’, e.g.
The Dark City (1950), The Dark Passage (1947), The Dark Past (1948), The Dark Corner
(1946), Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), The Dark Mirror (1946), So Dark the Night
(1946).
b) the use of expressions from the hard-boiled crime idiom (as with Framed (1947), Decoy
(1946), Fall Guy (1947), Raw Deal (1948), The Set-Up (1949), The Mob (1951), On
Dangerous Ground (1952).
c) the suggestion of a fatalistic or existential thematic, or moods of despair and paranoia,
with obsession and alienation, e.g. Edge of Doom (1950), They Won’t Believe Me (1947),
Cornered (1945), I Walk Alone (1948), Criss-Cross (1949), Desperate (1947) and Fear
(1946).
d) the promise of a delirious combination of violence, death, and sexuality, as in Kiss of
Death (1947), Kiss the Blood off My Hands (1948), Killer’s Kiss (1955), Murder, My
Sweet (1944), Murder Is My Beat (1955).
(Hirsch 1981:10)
These major relationships attached to film noir are therefore significant as they also
highlight the multiple aspects that these films represent. Moreover, the idea of a shared
tone posits the theory that film noir resulted from a collective auteurism, that is, from the
similar stylistic subversions that many directors used within the American system (it might
in this sense be the creation of cinematographers rather than writers or directors). I have
acknowledged throughout this study that the stylistic qualities of film noir, specifically its
visual motifs, are important characteristics that unify these films, though they need to be
articulated with a specific mise-en-scène that controls the conception of character and
limits the possibilities of action. Noir, then, could be seen as the product of a (stylistic)
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