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

the kind of dark ambience that is so characteristic of noir, with its low-key photography
and chiaroscuro. The expressive conventions of film noir, at the level of camerawork and
lighting, connote such qualities as alienation (the dark streets, for instance, become
emblems of it), obsession (the camera’s dim light showing the character’s unrelenting
gaze), or paranoia and a hauntedness which violence cannot dispel.
Scarface was the epitome of violence for its time and its ruthless characters were,
for example, expanded on later in film noir. Tony’s sister, Francesca (Ann Dvorak), seeks
to have her own independence but her brother’s domineering control asphyxiates her,
leading to the film’s sense of entrapment and claustrophobia with its strong whiff of
perverse sexuality. Most of these elements (which would later punctuate noir narratives),
were already part of the three earliest gangster films that I have discussed. Vain Little
Caesar would have no time for women or any sort of social relationship except with his
childhood friend Joe Massara; Tom Powers confounds women with distorted images of
mothers and prostitutes; 17 and Toni Camonte holds an obliquely incestuous interconnection
with his sister. In each case, the characters seem to care only about their own egos and
their public images, and their misogyny is in stark contrast to the sense of inferiority and
compulsive attractions recurrent in film noir. The gangster story certainly suggests that the
“bad guy” is not average or normal when compared to the rest of the society; however,
there is usually a simple moral dilemma when contrasting good and evil. The idea laying
behind the gangster film is to put an end to organised crime by showing that the antihero
character may rise rapidly but must inevitably fall and die in squalor. The unheroic noir
protagonists do not dominate their environments like public figures. The labyrinths of
corruption mean that it is extended from the petty criminals to the most powerful and
influential sectors in society, like police departments, businesses, and political circles. It is
a maze for the noir protagonist because there is no turning back once they enter it and there
are no readily available moral compasses.
Unlike the gangster (whose whole life is an effort to assert himself as an individual
and who ultimately finds himself eradicated by the forces of social order), the noir hero is
weighed down by failure and assailed by the twists of fate itself; often in a strictly moral
sense they do not deserve what happens to them. As Al Roberts (Tom Neal), the main
17 The breakfast scene (see fig. 15 above) in which Tom Powers, in his stripped pyjamas, abuses Kitty (Mae
Clarke) with a grapefruit that he plants full on his face remains a classic example of the gangster’s sexual
attitudes.
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