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

which collapses the distinction between dream and reality; its eroticism,
particularly in the scene where Roman sexually badgers and then abuses his female
barber and manicurist; its unprecedented elements, such as the dreamed death of
the hero; and its aspects of cruelty and ambivalence, as best illustrated in what
begins as a comic scene, when Johnson [Lloyd Corrigan] is looking over Roman’s
wine cellar accompanied by Gino and ends up being trapped there with a killer
dog. (Silver & Ward 1992:55)
The Black Curtain was the first adaptation of Woolrich’s work into a film by Jack
Hively, named The Street of Chance, released by Paramount in 1942. This film is an
important early entry in the noir canon as it institutes a set of conventions that later helped
to define film noir. Frank Thompson (Burgess Meredith) plays the role of an amnesia
victim, who awakens in the middle of an unfamiliar section of a New York street only to
discover that he does not know who he is or what he has done. After a while, he comes to
learn that his lost year has been haunted with many different things, including the fact that
he is running away from a murder he cannot recall having committed.
Director Jack Hively manages to detain the atmosphere of Woolrich’s universe,
using the alienation of the protagonist, whose amnesia makes him totally frantic in New
York City. The first scenes of the film give that noir milieu of urban angst and
displacement through the visual effects and sensibility of the director of photography,
Theodore Sparkuhl. Best known for his work in La Chienne by Jean Renoir and a veteran
of both German Expressionism and French Poetic Realism - as I will further explain in the
next chapters - Sparkuhl manages in Street of Chance to develop a whole black and chaotic
world that is so characteristically of Woolrich and of film noir. In fact, “the pages of [his]
pulps are rich with female jewel thieves of certain elegance who seem always to be in
formal attire at a country house party or a penthouse soiree” (Penzler 2007:xiii). Penzler
also adds that in Woolrich’s novels, these young women serve as amateur detectives, but
“they function largely in the same manner as their male counterparts, though they are often
required to use their seductive beauty to escape capture” (ibid.). This film launched Claire
Trevor’s career and earned her the nickname of “Queen of Noir”. 10 In Street of Chance,
Sparkuhl also helps to give a proper yet oppressively moody low-key lighting to the whole
10 It is interesting to note that numerous Woolrich stories were bought for the movies after publication and
that Claire Trevor would be the chosen artist to play in some of them. There is a fifty-eight-minute B-movie
called Convicted (1938), released by Columbia, and starring a young Rita Hayworth, based on “Face Work”
one of Woolrich’s memorable “Black” series. However, it was in the radio’s famous Suspense series, aired as
“Angel Face”, with Claire Trevor as the kind stripper who tries to save her brother from being convicted of a
murder, that “Face Work” attained its major success.
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