Abstract
This chapter presents a comparative analysis of four films that have often been held up as paradigmatic of film noir: The Maltese Falcon (1941, often considered the first noir film), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944), Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1945), and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947). To have a stable base for comparison, in each film I focus on the scenes in which the male protagonist first meets the femme fatale figure. Working through each film/scene individually, I show that each uses this conventional story beat in very different ways and that their differences go beyond simply being variations on a single unifying theme. The chapter overall is a hinge between the conceptual/theoretical arguments of the introduction and the extended close readings of the remaining body chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
For further analysis of Scarlet Street’s complex and de-centered narrative perspective, see Adrian Martin’s “Guess-Work: Scarlet Street” in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 3, January 2012.
- 2.
For more on Lang’s use of “suppressive narrative” in his American films, see Douglas Pye’s essays “Seeing Glimpses: Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia” (in CineAction 1988) and “The Suppressive Narrative and Film Noir: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” (in The Book of Film Noir [Cameron 1991]), which are discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
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Deyo, N. (2020). The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, and Out of the Past: Paradigm Cases. In: Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood. Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_2
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