Abstract
This final chapter analyzes Anthony Mann’s Reign of Terror and The Tall Target, two films that blend noir aesthetics and action/thriller narrative structures with historical fiction, telling the stories of Maximilien Robespierre’s overthrow and a foiled assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln, respectively. The analysis primarily focuses on the question of how the films manage to build and maintain suspense (the key element of the action/thriller genre) despite the fact that their historical settings mean their story’s outcomes are mostly never in doubt. I show that the films principally accomplish this by directing audience attention away from overarching questions about large-scale narrative events and toward isolated spectacle. I conclude by considering the films’ endings, each of which returns suddenly and unexpectedly to a grander historical perspective. These sudden shifts, I argue, work to stage a dialectical confrontation between past and present.
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Deyo, N. (2020). Reign of Terror and The Tall Target: Theses on the Philosophy of History. 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_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_8
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