Contenu du sommaire : « Femmes fatales », « hommes en crise » ? Réexaminer les modèles genrés du film noir

A case study of two Barbara Stanwyck films released in 1950, The File on Thelma Jordan and No Man of Her Own illustrate the ease with which film noir and the woman's picture could be mated in vehicles built for a major female star. These two films narratively and stylistically register the generic instability and porousness of film noir. The promotion of these films in newspaper ads, moreover, built upon and exploited their generic ambiguity. Centering the numerous newspaper ads was Stanwyck's star text through her already strong identification with both woman's pictures and film noir. As a case study, then, the two films show the basis of noir as a melodramatic mode.

This article aims to examine how the persona and performance of some actresses modify the the female gothic through four significant examples : Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry Wrong Number (Anatol Litvak, 1948), Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear ( David Miller, 1952) and Female on the Beach (Joseph Pevney, 1955) and Susan Hayward in I Thank a Fool (Robert Stevens, 1962). Even if these films present plots that recall the great successes of the early 1940s in this register, Stanwyck, Crawford and Hayward have the assurance and seduction of the “femmes fatales” of film noir, while their characters often exercise financial, legal and sentimental authority on subjugated husbands or lovers. They are absolutely no longer ingénues, but are closer to the “superwomen” defined by Haskell, capable of appropriating certain characteristics traditionally considered as masculine and therefore alter the gendered models usually at work in the female gothic.

This article builds on the recent questioning of the critical consensus on film noir as the locus of the representation of “men in crisis” to examine how the notion of “anti-hero” of classical film noir scholarship has shaped the content of Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (Bob Rafelson), the 1981 remakes of Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946). Influenced by the intellectual and aesthetic context of the 1980s characterized by “allusionism” (Carroll 1982) and “movie-consciousness” (Thompson and Bordwell, 2003 [1994]: 517) that fostered the cross-fertilization between film theory and film practice, neo-noir filmmakers have produced films that are actually more faithful to the critical findings than the classical film noirs themselves. To illustrate this, the article looks at the transformations that the two original films noirs have undergone along with their effects and shows how critical scholarship on classical film noir is put into practice in the neo-noir remakes.

This essay considers the face of the femme fatale, a character at the core of films noirs. I consider the character of Else in the incomplete and lesser known Jean Renoir film La Nuit du carrefour (1932), the first filmic adaptation of Georges Simenon's eponymous novel. I interpret the film as a poetic and surrealist vision of the femme fatale who is rather a child-woman in French cinema. She is also a foreigner, which adds to the charm and mystery in relation to Inspector Maigret, ushering a troubling discourse to the film, through the xenophobic traits that come out of the dialogues.

The paper seeks to analyse the characterisation of the “hero” or the male protagonist in three Indian film noirs: Bees Saal Baad (Biren Naug, 1962), Woh Kaun Thi? (Raj Khosla, 1964), and Kuheli (Tarun Majumdar, 1971). The Indian film noir of the 1960s and 1970s is distinct from the classical Hollywood film noir in the sense it emphasises on a happy resolution of the events that culminate in the climax, and an emphasis on the balance between traditional Indian values of austerity and Western glamour. In its quest to establish an optimistic message to attract the masses, Indian film noir glorified the male protagonist, transforming him from a character with multiple shades of grey to the “Adarsh” (ideal) male patriarch who would restore peace and harmony within the Indian family, and save the core of Indian patriarchy from the Westernised, decadent femme fatale—a figure that the upper-class Brahmanical patriarchy had been suspicious after the two World Wars ushered in a new era of sexual and socio-economic liberation. Situated between this ever-present tussle of modernity and tradition, the heroes—Shankar Roy from Kuheli, Kumar Vijay Singh from Bees Saal Baad, and Dr Anand from Woh Kaun Thi?, return to their ancestral homes with a mission, thus acting as the fuel the subtext of being the harbingers of Enlightenment to the “ignorant” community shrouded in delusions and superstitions, and experience anxiety regarding their fragile masculinity upon encountering phenomena that are beyond the limits of rationality. Ultimately, they do solve the mystery that plagues them and the communities, thereby reinforcing the trope of the benevolent cultural reformer who rescues the savage and ignorant natives from the Kurzian “heart of darkness.”

The influence of film noir is reflected in Indian popular cinema through narratives that portray the aesthetics of crime-infested, morally deranged and extremely violent urban cityscapes where characters deal with the anxieties of a modern world. The representation of women in such narratives presents a context that challenges the way female characters are imagined and stereotyped in traditional Indian film narratives. This paper examines the social, cultural and historical construction of female identity in Indian cinema through the lens of female gangsters and film noir. The noir space in Bollywood cinematic narratives is dominated by hypermasculine, morally elusive, and existentially indifferent villains/anti-hero personas. However, by portraying the role of gangsters and criminals, women also occupy the underworlds of crime and action. They violate the norms of culturally assigned gender performance by fundamentally disrupting the entertainment value associated with the traditional picturization of the female identity. This article argues that the noir female portrayals that disrupt the symbiotic relationships between conventional gender politics and cultural norms emerge as a new category of transgressive figures that walk the thin line of moral dichotomies. They subvert their existing identities to create a state of gendered unpredictability by replacing male subjective positions.