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

protagonist of Edgar Ulmer’s Detour notes, “That’s life. Whichever way you turn, fate
sticks out a foot to trip you”. Indeed, the film shows that his struggle against fate is
injurious to himself, as he concludes: “Fate or some mysterious force can put the finger on
you or me for no good reason at all.” The noir main character is normally more withdrawn,
introspective and alienated from the rest of American society, and usually wants to escape
from himself and from a past which continues to obsess him. At bottom, the gangster is
doomed because once he gets to the top he starts feeling insecure (like Macbeth, the
method he uses to attain power leave him open to others), and so through paranoia he is
likely to bring about his own downfall and death.
The protagonist in many noir films is a man who walks alone, in the city streets,
who elects to travel a path outside the law. Being a social narrative, the gangster story also
takes place in the American big city, classically either New York or Chicago, where the
gangster shows his refusal to conform or bow down to economic adversity, especially
during the Prohibition and Great Depression era. The urban setting in the thirties gangster
story is slightly different from the city that appears in film noir. Most of the scenes in
gangster dramas are shot as interiors, in studio sets. We get to see the buildings from the
outside within large and crowded cities as establishing shots but then rapidly the city seems
to narrow down into the secret subterranean world of the criminal: hotel rooms, jazz and
nightclubs, sleazy bars, casinos, where stylishly dressed gang bosses and their female
companions (the “molls”, as Hughes refer to them) toast their crimes with prohibited
drinks. These places are all connected to organised crime and its rewards. In noir, these
types of scenario are also typical, namely the jazz clubs and nightclubs, as Nicholas
Christopher remarks:
(…) in the noir city, the nightclub can serve as a glittering, silvery-black mirror
reflecting the after-hours diversions of the postwar economic boom, and at the
same time can appear to be no more than a sordid, gloomy watering hole for life’s
losers. A place which the noir hero must enter for various reasons during his quest
– usually with disdain. The nightclub can be the center of a duplicitous moral or
criminal web, run by a man whose interests radiate outward from the club itself.
(Christopher 1997:120)
Gangsters were therefore, like the noir hero, creatures of the city, which provided
them with protection to a certain extent. However, in its beginnings and through its
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