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

flashing lights outside with their neon to the reflection of Marlowe’s face), using low-key
and high-contrast techniques to make it clear to us that we live in a troubled and gloomy
world beyond control. Director Dmytryk, along with the screenwriter, John Paxton,
transformed Chandler’s work into a film which has strong noir elements, specifically with
the representation of Claire Trevor (Velma / Mrs Grayle), as a conniving, evil woman, and
Dick Powell’s hard-boiled toughness. Murder, My Sweet follows the hard-boiled tradition
and a form of Expressionism transmitted through Marlowe’s character, when, for example,
totally drugged, he starts dreaming of images that seem to be unreal, creating an
atmosphere of fear and dislocation. The film develops then within a closed system using
two recurring devices of film noir: the flashback and the voiceover narration.
In hard-boiled writing, the city appears as a central symbol, one of the most
recurrent elements in noir. It materializes into a human trap, leading to the self-destruction
of the characters, exploring the darkness within the human spirit, and luring them ever
deeper into the worst psychotic enthralments. In both Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and
Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles respectively are
corrupt and disorientating for both male protagonists, making them their victims, as
Nicholas Christopher points out. In fact, he establishes a parallelism between the city,
tinged with suspicion and absurdity, and a ruthless maze which the noir hero (haplessly)
tries to find his way out of:
The labyrinth in the film noir – the city-as-world – is made to appear implacable
and unassailable, and the hero puny and vulnerable. The one, all stone and steel,
will endure; the other will play out a short, transient role among millions of others
as insignificant and interchangeable as he, and then disappear. For a brief interlude,
he will be like a free-floating electron off the great mass of men. The hero of a film
noir is not the hero as we find him elsewhere in film. Heroic he may appear on
occasion, even recklessly so, and brave, and sympathetic despite his deep flaws,
but he comes into sharpest focus on one of those rain-washed, shadowy, starkly lit
streets that is the terra cognita of the film noir, I see him (and have always
identified with him) for what he really is: a victim. (Christopher 1997:32)
Chandler is rightly regarded as one of the best writers about Los Angeles. Through
the eyes of Philip Marlowe, the reader can see and enjoy the streets and hill sides of this
city, which is sometimes described very vividly, and at the same time showing its aspects
of decadence and material corruption. Some critics, namely James Naremore, have pointed
out that a novel such as The Big Sleep every so often brings to mind T. S. Eliot’s darkest,
46