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139 The discourse on film noir belongs largely to postmodernist culture but is preoccupied with modernist values in a series of Hollywood thrillers or bloody melodramas from the 1940s and ‘50s. The pictures it names are a heterogeneous group, dealing with everything from hard-boiled detectives (The Maltese Falcon) to bourgeois women in distress (Caught), from love on the run (Gun Crazy) to foreign intrigue (The Mask of Dimitrios), from costume melodrama (Reign of Terror) to western adventure (Pursued), and from sleek eroticism (Gilda) to naturalistic social satire (Sweet Smell of Success).Even so,we can make a few generalizations about them.Considered generically, they involve what Jean-Paul Sartre called “extreme situations” and are usually located in a realistic realm somewhere between gothic horror and dystopian science fiction. Stylistically, they tend to be associated with angular photography, subjective modes of narration, and an approximately Freudian or deterministic view of character. Commercially, they blur the distinction between formula pictures and art movies. Why, then, does the literature on film noir have so little to say about Alfred Hitchcock? Much of his work would at first glance seem to belong somewhere within the broad category I’ve just described, and yet Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style gives detailed treatment only to Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, and The Wrong Man. Patrick Brion’s lavishly illustrated coffee-table reference, Le film noir, includes all of these plus Rebecca, Suspicion, Vertigo, and, in more qualified fashion, North by Northwest. (If the last, why not virtually everything else?) Critical studies of noir, with the notable exception of Seymour Hirsch’s Film Noir:The Dark Side of the Screen, usually mention Hitchcock briefly or in passing, and writings on Hitchcock as an auteur seldom deploy the idea of noir. Slavoj Žižek even goes so far as to argue that “Hitchcock’s universe is ultimately Hitchcock at the Margins of Noir 140 / Authors, Actors, Adaptations incompatible with that of the film noir” (“In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,” 258). Few critics would take such a radical position, but even when they acknowledge Hitchcock’s importance to the so-called noir movement or genre, they often describe him as sui generis or a “strange case.” This tendency can be traced back to the very origins of critical writing on American film noir.The French cinephiles who created the category (which has less to do with a body of artifacts than with a discourse and a set of values that determine how certain films will be read) recognized from the beginning that Hitchcock was one of its practitioners, but they spoke about him in qualified or tangential ways. Consider Nino Frank, the critic often regarded as the first person to apply the term noir to American movies, whose well-known 1946 essay on noir in L’Écran français is chiefly concerned with a series of “criminal adventures” that had recently been released in Paris: The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura, and Murder, My Sweet. Frank observes in passing that Hitchcock’s Suspicion belongs at least technically in the same group as the others; it, too, is a literary adaptation, inspired by an “admirable novel by Francis Iles,” and it emphasizes criminal psychology rather than mystery or detection. In Frank’s opinion, however, Suspicion is an “absolute failure” (14; translation mine). Apparently Frank was in agreement with Billy Wilder, who, just prior to the release of Double Indemnity, had publicly declared his intention to “out-Hitchcock Hitchcock.” Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s groundbreaking historical study, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, translated into English in 2002, makes a roughly similar argument, situating Hitchcock at the borders of “true” Hollywood noir, which Borde and Chaumeton regard as a quasi-surrealistic form determined by an American social and cultural context. Hitchcock’s prewar British films (particularly The 39 Steps, Sabotage, and Jamaica Inn) strike Borde and Chaumeton as noir-like to a degree but only a “feeble” influence on the American style (22). In their view, Rebecca and Suspicion are formative pictures in an emerging noir series, but Spellbound, which takes a quasi-clinical approach to psychoanalysis , is closer in spirit to a social-problem picture like Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit. Shadow of a Doubt, on the other hand, is a “major opus” (33), helping to shape a new, distinctively American style of dark movies about attractive...

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