Both “bad girl” and “film noir” are terms to be understood loosely in this two-volume, eight-film collection from Sony, but I’m more than willing to put up with a little hype if it means bringing some fresh material to market. To say the least, this isn’t a director-oriented collection; the strongest personality here is the redoubtable Hugo Haas, represented by “One Girl’s Confession,” one of his least pathological productions (this time, Cleo Moore is the masochist).
There are two anonymous efforts by Lewis Seiler (“Women’s Prison,” 1955; “Over-Exposed,” 1956); two somewhat more flavorful films from Henry Levin (“Night Editor,” 1946; “Two of a Kind,” 1951) that suggest Levin had a little more kink in him than his bland Fox comedies would suggest; and a half-hearted medical melodrama from Irving Rapper (“Bad for Each Other,” 1953) which manages to make Charlton Heston look like a much worse actor than he actually was. More intriguing are the two on-location thrillers, “The Killer That Stalked New York” by Earl McAvoy and “The Glass Wall” by Maxwell Shane, both of which show the very strong influence that neorealism was bringing to bear on Hollywood practices, even on this marginal level of production. The latter film goes so far as to import Vittorio Gassman, in his first English language role, to play a Hungarian displaced person on the run in New York City; his attempts to find refuge in Times Square were filmed, according to the trailer, with “hidden cameras” — probably 16-millimeter rigs loaded with high speed newsreel stock.
The performers, of course, are the center of attraction here, and if the set offers a little too much of the fleshy Cleo Moore (in three films, including the all-star “Women’s Prison”), it does showcase Lizabeth Scott (in two films), Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Audrey Totter, Gertrude Michael, Juanita Moore and Mae Clarke (all in “Women’s Prison”), Evelyn Keyes (“The Killer That Stalked New York”) and the underrated Janis Carter — whose enthusiastic interpretation of a decadent socialite who gets turned on by the prospect of examining a battered corpse in “Night Editor” makes her the baddest girl of this bunch. That’s her above, with William Gargan. My New York Times review is here.
Dave, I don’t know whether this might be an issue of my own computer, but there’s no photo with your online post, of Janis Carter or anyone else.
I’m experiencing technical difficulties, Jonathan — no doubt due to all that Superbowl betting on the internet. Things should be back to normal soon.
I see Janis so the problem must now be solved.
Janis Carter is so very, very bad in I MARRIED A COMMUNIST/aka THE WOMAN ON PIER 13 (50), luring weak American men to their demise at the hands of Killer Commie Thugs Directly Controlled by Stalin. She is merely very bad in FRAMED (47), but Glenn Ford manages to pull himself back from the brink of the abyss that is Janis Carter.
Is Ida Lupino in WOMEN’S PRISON so totally, hysterically vicious because she’s a repressed, as they called ‘em in the 50s, “Twilight Gal” putting herself in the way of temptation among restless, caged bodacious she-cats?! It’s not explicit, but it’s always a possibility . . .
Evelyn Keyes’s perspiration should have won a special Academy Award in 1950. Unprecedented, really.
Bless you Sony/Columbia!
Dave and Jonathan: All the photos are on my screen in glorious black and white and they look luscious!
Unfortunately, no picture of Mrs Haas, who starred on six (I think) movies directed by her husband — the screen’s arch-masochist (the poor man’s von Sternberg?) Isn’t it time to revive the entire Haas-Moore opus, no matter how awful their movies are supposed to be?
Tavernier has seen one of Haas’s czech films (“The White Plague”) and says it’s much more ambitious and much better than his American films. (in our book he described it as an “antifascist parabola”).
The cast of “Women’s Prison” is indeed attractive. So many bad girls! Dave is right, they don’t make them now as they used to.
I was lucky enough to catch PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET on television in the UK today – the first time I have ever seen it. Since we’re interpreting the terms loosely, I’ll sing the praises of Thelma Ritter in Fuller’s film. I’m sure everyone on this board knows the film and the character of Mo. Not all ‘bad’ and certainly not a ‘girl’ like the actresses represented in the films under consideration. Nevertheless, a brilliant turn and smart talking, by a fantastic actress. Badass simply put.
Here’s the poetic print ad tag lines for the Haas/Moore masterwork HIT AND RUN (United Artists ’57):
Pay-Up Sucker (Haas) . . .Pick-Up Girl (Moore) . . . Hush-Up Lover (Vince Edwards)
Blonde. . . Husband . . .Other Man
Under the Same Roof – - -
And Someone’s Going to Die For Love!
Haas should be recognized for the OTHER 1957 Multiple Personality Disorder movie LIZZIE, starring genteel Miss Eleanor Parker. Alas, overshadowed by that Joanne Woodward flick . . .
It’s not too late to make amends . . .
(Supremely talented composer brother Pavel’s fate at the hands of the Nazis is almost unbearable to think about).
Here’s a link to Kim Morgan’s video essay on In a Lonely Place, which is one of the best things on noir that I have seen in this newfangled web-generated video essay format.
If Janis Carter is the thesis, and Cleo Moore the antithesis, then is Beverly Michaels or Peggy Castle the synthesis?
Ms. Carter and her cigarette holder were indeed a force to be reckoned with for this 7 year old watching THE WOMAN ON PIER 13 repeatedly on New York”s “Million Dollar Movie.”It really is a shame that she and so many other of these actresses virtually disappeared with the end of the noir trend
And as long as we are talking about Hugo Haas, he did one called HOLD BACK TOMORROW that seemed a bit off the charts even by the standard of a Hugo Haas film. Unfortunately it is Universal, and I’m not sure which Encore niche channel would want to claim it.
Some favorite “bad girls” of noir (or quasi-noir) films:
Ann Savage: Detour
Marie Windsor: The Killing
Barbara Stanwyck: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (also, of course, Double Indemnity)
Agnes Moorehead: Dark Passage
Gene Tierney: Leave Her to Heaven (Technicolor noir)
Cleo Moore: Strange Fascination
Beverly Michaels: Pick-Up
Lana Turner: The Postman Always Rings Twice
Mercedes McCambridge: Johnny Guitar (Trucolor western noir?)
Barry I haven’t seen HOLD BACK TOMORROW (a great title). I understand it’s about a man on death row who wants to spend his last night with Cleo Moore (according to Maltin he marries her for that purpose). Have I got it right? I guess you have to use what’s available when you’re about to fry… It was written and produced as well as directed by Haas.
Yes Jean-Pierre, that’s the movie and that’s the premise. But it’s ONLY the beginning! The transcendence of love and faith as presided over by priest Frank de Kova had me re-thinking my whole approach to the works of Frank Borzage. Of course, that was only from one viewing, and it might have been something I ate. I’ve looked forward for years to another shot at it.
The trailer for HOLD BACK TOMORROW is up on Youtube. John Agar bulges his eyes to portray his sociopathic tendencies, while Cleo momentarily forgets one of her lines . . .
Hugo was indeed one of the ultimate auteurs of 50′s cinema. Most
everything he did was awful but how many could claim director/
actor/writer & producer!In theory he was in the company of Welles & Chaplin in reality his films define camp. Bait is a real treat mixing in John Agar & Cedric Hardwicke as Satan. Actually Hugo’s last film, Paradise Alley is still rather lame but I’ve always had a soft spot for it in the world of film about film.
Glad to see some facetime for the great Lizabeth Scott. Now if only someone will get a clean print of her ultimate film, Too Late For Tears. One of the bleakest but funniest noirs Haskin’s finest hour is centered with the dream team of Scott & Dan Duryea.
Sample dialogue: Liz- What do I call you beside stupid?
Dan- Stupid will do if you don’t bruise easily.
To follow up in jean pierre’s list, let’s not bypass,
Yvonne De Carlo in “Criss Cross”
Jane Greer in “Out of the Past”
Rita Hayworth in “The Lady from Shanghai” and, if we can believe Pete Hamill’s “Why Sinatra Matters,” the
very bad Ava Gardner of “The Killers.”
My favorite bad girl of the the ’40s is Veronica Lake’s Connie Dickason in Andre de Toth’s terrific noir western “Ramrod” (1947). Lake and De Toth were married at the time — one is free to speculate on how that fact did or did not affect what we see on the screen.
A bit of indelible dialogue from “Ramrod,” though it depends to some extent on the way the lines are delivered. Toward the end of the film, Lake’s character (a semi-crazed, Barbara Stanwyck-like rancher who’s secretly stoked up a range war and is in love with her noble, innocent, recovering-drunk foreman, played by Joel McCrea), has a tense encounter with McCrea’s best friend, played by Don DeFore, who knows just what dire bad-girl stuff Lake has been been engineering.
Lake: “You don’t like me, do you?”
DeFore: “You’re like a horse, a dog, or any other man or woman. Once I understand you, you’re all right.”
Personally speaking, I’ve never found the bad-girls especially bad, and am fairly bored with the cinephile noir fetishization of femmes fatales. My favourite mal filles tend to be very scary or very mysterious.
Scary would be,
Ann Savage, Detour
Agnes Moorehead Dark Passage
Gene Tierney Leave Her to Heaven
Mysterious would be,
Jean Simmons in that Otto Preminger movie
Yvonne DeCarlo in Criss Cross(“Love schmove…I want to live!”)
Also contained on Vol. 1 is a nice surprise: a “Ford Television Theatre” episode scripted by Blake Edwards, entitled “The Pay-Off”. I’ve no idea if it’s turned up on any PD releases before (as Edwards’s work for “Four Star Playhouse” has), but it’s a welcome addition nonetheless, especially for a release – as Dave has mentioned – that’s decidedly not auteur-driven.
There are few, but also some good (more or less reliable) noir(or maybe quasi-noir)-girls:
- Wanda Hendrix in Robert Montgomery´s “Ride the Pink horse”
- Marvellous Gail Russell in Joseph Losey´s “The lawless”
- Colleen Miller in Jack Arnold´s “Man in the shadow”
- Debra Paget in great Allan Dwan´s masterpiece “The river´s edge”
TCM tangent,
Might there be something more than wild surmise to my impression, watching bits of 8 1/2 yesterday evening, that Guido’s cowboy hat was inspired by that worn by Martin’s Bama Dillert in SOME CAME RUNNING? After all dipslays lots of cowboy hats but few if any more strikingly in a post WWII milieu than Dillert’s in SOME CAME RUNNING.
(Bad BOYS both, Guido and Bama, if perhaps golden hearted.)
To Yusef,
Moe in the Fuller film is one of the greatest characters in film history. She did tie saleswomen the world over proud. One of my favourite bits is when right before her justly revered death scene, she enters her apartment, the way she moves in that room is breathtaking, one can sense years of memories just Thelma Ritter’s performance in that small moment.
Barbara Stanwyck in DOUBLE INDEMNITY may be the prototype for the noir bad girl, but she got some good advice from a neighbor and philosophy enthusiast already in BABY FACE (1933): “A woman, young, beautiful like you, can get anything she wants in the world. Because you have power over men. But you must use men, not let them use you. You must be a master, not a slave. Look here — Nietzsche says, “All life, no matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation.” That’s what I’m telling you. Exploit yourself. Go to some big city where you will find opportunities! Use men! Be strong! Defiant! Use men to get the things you want!”
Arthur S.: If Savage, Moorehead and Tierney are not bad girls in those films I don’t know what a bad girl is! Of course they’re scary too, as bad girls should…
Moe, on the other hand, is definitly not a bad girl.
Interestingly (to me at least) “bad girl” doesn’t translate well into French; there’s no equivalent two-words phrase. Not that there are no bad girls in French films or French real life, but they’re called differently.
Alex, my little list didn’t claim to be exhaustive; there are so many bad girls! And how could one bypass Jane Greer in “Out of the Past”?
Beverly Michaels began her film career at the top in LeRoy’s glossy EAST SIDE WEST SIDE (49) and did variations on the character in working-class milieus in such gems as Rouse’s WICKED WOMAN and Haas’s PICKUP. Her thick, sullen, deep monotone was peerlessly, sheerly NASTY.
Although exhaustion is beyond question, the fusion of the femme fatalle with the chirf protagonist as with Linda Fiorentino in Dalh’s THE LAST SEDUCTION would seem to define one limit to the femme fatalle (if perhaps no “bad Girl”) phenmena? Any other femme fatall protagonists?
Any films where a woman is protagonist and led astray by a “bad boy”?
For a stone cold, unrepentent-even-on-her-deathbed bad girl, check out Jean Gillie in “Decoy”, which is paired with “Crime Wave” on a DVD in the 2007 Film Noir Classic Collection from Warner Bros.
“Any films where a woman is protagonist and led astray by a “bad boy”?”
With the ending Hitchcock intended I guess SUSPICION would have fit the description.
My impression of the Hugo Haas/Cleo Moore films was always tainted by the one-star reviews they invariably received in the Steven Scheuer paperback movie guides I bought while in high school. I also believe it was Scheuer who said of “Bride Of Frankenstein”: “Way above average for this kind of trash”, or words to that effect …
Gloria Grahame is nobody’s victim in In A Lonely Place, and she’s not really led astray per se, but the film definitely deals with the ambiguity underlying alex’s question.
(That’s how good Ray was: on the same theme – a woman suspects her man of being a murderer – he could make a better film than Hitchcock!)
Women can get seduced by bad men: Jean Wallace in THE BIG COMBO (Joseph H. Lewis) and Anne Baxter in THE BLUE GARDENIA (Fritz Lang) come to mind. Neither actually becomes a criminal, though, unlike all those men vamped by femme fatales.
Good women also go undercover, and wind up in ambiguous relationships with charming mobsters in RAILROADED! (Mann) and DESTINATION MURDER (Edward L. Cahn).
Of the films reviewed, have only seen two: THE GLASS WALL and THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK.
THE GLASS WALL is a surprisingly good movie, for something this obscure. It has the earnest political liberalism one finds in so many 1950′s films. Directors weren’t afraid to take a stand back then. They also spelled out their ideas in full, unlike all the waffling in modern society.
THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK didn’t gel IMHO on the storytelling level. It has an interesting premise, about detectives tracking down disease. This was done much better in PANIC IN THE STREETS (Kazan). Wouldn’t mind seeing THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK again, though.
I have alsways liked Barbara Stanwyck’s “bad girl” in THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN — another great movie from 1950.
Alex, you should check out Valentina Cortese’s characters in THE HOUSE OF TELEGRAPH HILL and SECRET PEOPLE.
Apropos of nothing, FORCE OF ARMS is now available from Warner Archive.
I’ve just bumped into this on youtube. A very funny and touching conversation between Quentin Tarantino and Kirk Douglas on Douglas’s underrated gem POSSE.
http://www.youtube.com/user/aicnquint#p/a/u/1/7zgdbjIc0Ko
Claire Trevor is a naughty girl in MURDER MY SWEET. She almost ruined poor Dennis O’Keefe’s life in RAW DEAL, but had the decency to get back to her senses before the end.
Alex, to answer your question – In BORN TO KILL, Trevor switch sides and acts as a girl vicimized by the Lawrence Tierney character (althought she does play dirty in certain moments)
Kent, Dieterle’s THE LAST FLIGHT is also available from Warner Archive. Possibly one of the greatest films ever made.
It is strange to witness how “film noir” has become a popular tradmerk that can sell hundreds of “old” titles from the tudios. The word “film noir” has become over the years as popular as “jazz” or “rockn’roll”. I did my high school thesis on film noir and it’s a fascinating but restricting subject. The piece by Durgnat ha sopened my eyes on how “noir” has more to do with an attitude than with a genre. But we discussed this in another thread. I recently discovered DECOY which has a very impressive female character. Alex, I regard LAST SEDUCTION as one of the most stupid and overrated films of the 90′s, just like many “neo noirs” films such as BLACK RAIN, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS or more recently, the adaptation of the comic book SIN CITY. They make “film noir” look like a sort of recipe and they remind me of the terrible “Jazz tribute” albums by Wynton Marsalis… I mean film noir is like, you know…
I have always felt that there is quite a bit more range and ambiguity to the prototypical “bad girls” of the noir period than is generally conceded. Michael Kastner mentions Lizabeth Scott’s thoroughgoing evil in TOO LATE FOR TEARS (and the unfortunate quality of all of the P.D. prints of it floating around). But I also find her equally interesting in PITFALL, where she is primarily the victim of the all of the male characters’ obsessions, and in PAID IN FULL where she is primarily the victim of an overly rigid social morality.
John McElwee, I know what you mean. It took a conscious effort to break free from the first impressions imposed by the Scheuer and Maltin guides.
“And how could one bypass Jane Greer in “Out of the Past”?”
Indeed. I actually thought the Bad Girl Sweepstakes were settled for good once she incarnated Kathie Moffat. And she isn’t even blonde.
And yet “Bad Girl” doesn’t really do justice for me to how I feel about characters like this or Yvonne De Carlo’s Anna in “Criss Cross.” Because there is more to say about them than that. But maybe we each take away our own peronal resonances from some of these movies.
Lizabeth Scott is the kind of woman (on screen anyway) who makes one forever loyal to cinema, kind of as Dan Duryea does. It’s worth pointing out that there are different ways that actors like this can go. So on the question is there a “good girl” in film noir, I’d like to point out that while playing her share of “bad girls” Lizabeth also played ones I would not describe that way. My favorite role of hers actually falls into that category–in De Toth’s great “Pitfall” which is my favorite of all his films. Yes, she’s a single woman who gets into an affair with a married man but the way this happens, she seems all too human, and while get out of things at the fadeout OK at the end, she doesn’t, and is the film’s most sympathetic character.
And speaking of De Toth, it’s nice to hear such a good word for one of my other favorites of his “Ramrod.” As far as the part that Lake plays, she is as just as Larry describes and Lake is well-directed by De Toth, but I wouldn’t read too much into Connie being a bad girl, but De Toth also directed Lake in “Slattery’s Hurricane” (another of his best I believe) and in that one she is the good girl and Linda Darnell is well, less so anyway. The cast member who really surprises me in “Ramrod” most is actually Don DeFore; if you haven’t seen it, you may have trouble imagining him as a flamboyant gunman and kind of good/bad guy fallible friend of the hero, but he’s just great in the role.
Mike, I think you meant blonde Jean Wallace in “The Big Combo” and not the always wonderful brunette Jean Peters. And Alex, some here might not know that director’s name is actually John Dahl (one can make these corrections of mistyped names now–just a gentle suggestion).
Backtracking to Hugo Haas, it sometimes seems his status as a bad director is taken for granted without him being really checked out. Personally, I’m not so sure. I’ve only seen three of his films–one of them was “Hold Back Tomorrow” (though on a not so good tape) and I thought it was as interesting as Barry said and would like to see it again. By the way, it’s hard to know who has the rights–it might be Universal depending on what kind of deal Haas made but, like all his movies, it’s really and independent production with none of their people; he got dfferent studios to release his films. Of the three Haas I’ve seen, I liked that best and thought the direction was interesting, and only one of the others has the masochistic relationship of Haas to Cleo Moore (“Bait”) while Moore is absent in “Edge of Hell” (even if the title promises that she will be there)–it’s actually about a tramp (Haas) with a little dog as I recall, kind of like a low-rent “Umberto D.”
Nicolas, it all began with BODY HEAT. Film noir in a can.
Speaking of jazz and film noir, Charlie Haden’s Quartet West albums are the other side of the coin from the Marsalis tribute syndrome of which you speak. I love the one that begins with the opening of THE BIG SLEEP. I wonder if Jean-Pierre knows the ART OF THE SONG album, where the quartet is augmented with strings and on which Shirley Horn sings, among other things, “Lonely Town” and “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.”
Barry, re “Pitfall” we crossed there. Interesting we both thought of that one.
Blake,
Thank you!
I made the correction just in time.
Joan Crawford’s Louise Howell in Possessed is led astray by bad boy Van Heflin.
Since I referenced Barry’s post above, I find I can’t edit my first one.
Re the male protagonist (Dick Powell) in “Pitfall” it was supposed to say “and while he gets out of things at the fadeout OK at the end, she doesn’t, and is the film’s most sympathetic character.”
Also: “…but I wouldn’t read too much into Connie being a bad girl because De Toth also directed Lake in “Slattery’s Hurricane…”
I didn’t comment on any of the eight films in these collections. I’ve actually only seen of them–”Bad for Each Other”–and that was years ago. “The Glass Wall” sounds like one I’d want to see, and of course “Night Editor” for Janis Carter and the moment Dave evoked so well.
Audrey Totter was a VERY bad girl in John Berry’s excellent TENSION, treating her henpecked husband (Richard Basehart) like dirt and cheating on him with careless abandon. Fortunately he found a good girl in the person of Cyd Charisse no less, playing a photographer.
Barry and John Mc.E, those Guides can be misleading, the Scheuer more than the Maltin (and Scheuer didn’t give directors’ names). Over the years some bad ratings of very good films have been changed though.
For me film noir meant crime genre films that were special and unusual. That is, crime films that sought to do more and did more than what their genre or producer/distributor expected them to do. Essentially it was an elitist way of glorifying the best of the B-movies and disrespectable seeming films. Like Pickup on paper is another red-baiting hysterical film, the acutal movie is something totally different. Now everybody is taking any half-way interesting looking film and tacking them as noir for phony period glam.
Yvonne DeCarlo is most certainly not a “bad girl”. She’s just human and Criss Cross is a sad film because(SPOILERS i suppose) it touches on the fact that the person who uses her and exploits her most is the man who loves her and the finale even does away with the romanticism of lovers who die together, because right before that Anna Dundee tells Burt Lancaster that she has no choice but to walk away and leave him to die. It’s like that scene in Brecht’s MAHAGONNY opera.
In A Lonely Place is different because it’s a film where we identify with both the pieces of the couple equally and we can understand how one feels for the other from their point of view. That’s what makes the ending so heartbreaking, because it’s a couple that’s very suited to each other in most respects. It’s also different from other films noir in that the murder story is not important, it’s a film about a relationship and the holes and flaws that come up inside it.
Blake, I think of PITFALL quite often. To me, it has received nowhere near the level of examination it is due.
As Dave pointed out, one of the things that the noir period was about was a reaction having to do with returning war vets finding women holding their places in the work force. But it was also about so many other social and artistic elements taking place at the time which made it such a deep and varied body of work. To me, the kind of latter day “film noir in a can” as Kent so aptly describes it, is about a reaction to 70s feminism, film school aesthetics, and very little else.
“Film noir in a can.”
Good line, Kent. It’s supremely ironic that in all the years that the phrase “film noir” did mean something, no one ever said “Hey, let’s make a film noir” or “I’m making a film noir right now…”
But long after it was over, and even now, people will blithely say these exact things–and it’s all in their heads!
Call it postmodernism or something.
I don’t care about John Dahl, by the way. Just a reflex to correct spelling of someone’s name. Maybe I wouldn’t want him to be confused with the very interesting actor John Dall of “Rope” and “Gun Crazy.”
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With the ending Hitchcock intended I guess SUSPICION would have fit the description.
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According to Bill Krohn, the ending which Hitchcock shot and was rejected by the audience was totally different from what Hitchcock “claimed” years later as being the one he intended. He wanted to end the film with “SPOILER” Joan Fontaine drinking the glass of milk thinking it was poisoned, and then realizing it was not and rushing towards Cary Grant just when he was going to commit suicide and kill himself. The preview audience laughed at this ending(which might have been the point). Hitchcock wanted this ending because it brought out the suicidal masochism in Joan Fontaine’s character. Suspicion is a film about what Fassbinder claimed years later as being “the most insidious and most effective means of social repression” – Love.
Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent Harland in Leave Her to Heaven is another iconic “bad girl” but as is typical in genre films, her motivations are complicated and upon reflection, there is more depth to her construction than one expects from a melodrama ( John M. Stahl is the director, from a script credited to Jo Swerling, adapted from the Ben Ames Williams novel). Kim Morgan, if I may mention her yet again, is very good on the psychology of Harland in the film. Dave, you might want to look at Kim Morgan’s blog, Sunset Gun, and consider adding it to your blog roll. The problem is that though Leave Her to Heaven is sometimes classified as a noir, it isn’t really. It’s a melodrama, or a variation on the “woman’s picture,” and at best a precursor to film soleil, those noir inflected crime films of the 1990s that take place in desert or sunlight and that juggle the moral universe of the Hays era noirs. So many “noirs” are really something else – weepies, westerns, neo-realist procedurals – and don’t even display the core ingredients associated with noir, basically, expressionistic photography and an atmosphere of bleak fate – that the leap to inclusiveness is either a sin of enthusiasm or a commercial strategy. Leave Her to Heaven is woodsy and rural, like Road House, and shot in a rich looking Technicolor.
Arthur, I didn’t know that and never would have guessed it, since it seems to me that Grant sometimes behaves like someone planning to commit a murder also in scenes where we don’t see him through Fontaine’s imagination.
I think the concept of “film noir” is helpful since it points toward the sense of unease that comes to the fore in some post-WWII Hollywood movies. The war had dishevelled society and nothing was ever going to be quite the same again: women had joined the workforce in large numbers; gay men and women who had been scattered across the country had met others like them, and after the war congregated in NYC and SF, giving (re)birth to those cities’ gay communites and the gay movement itself. After serving in the war, Blacks had increased expectations that Jim Crow would be dismantled and equal protection enforced.
Noir seemed to herald an increased anxiety over new liberations and freedoms that emerged suddenly as a result of the disruptions of WWII rather than slowly over the course of time. Noir also reflects the fantastic growth of wealth in American society after the war, and the problems that this expansion brought with it. We may never be able to pinpoint with precision what films are/were noir, or exactly which directors should be on the list of noir practitioners, but as a concept noir does have its uses.