![]() ![]() None of the abuse is presented in sensationalist terms, with Charles Boyer’s character Gregory never explicitly hitting Bergman’s Paula, but instead documents the more subtle, difficult territory of emotional abuse. And neither does it seem intuitive that such a nuanced subject would be well suited to the form’s typically melodramatic and often overwrought style.īut in Gaslight, Cukor – who has a record of female-oriented films, from Katharine Hepburn’s turn as a lawyer interested in equal rights for women in Adam’s Rib to Judy Garland’s rise to fame in A Star Is Born – does a surprisingly good job of dramatising the subject in a painfully believable manner. Husbands abusing their wives was not a subject often addressed in classic Hollywood, and certainly not in film noirs, where women were typically written as femme fatales who themselves do most of the manipulating. But the misdeeds and malpractice that occupies the rotten core of the story is not of the familiar kind listed above, but instead of a more everyday offence that is complicated to present, and one that could never be misperceived as glamorous – that of domestic abuse. Its low key lighting and brooding music are classic examples of noir iconography, and conjures a tense, threatening atmosphere that persistently implies something is amiss. Take 1944’s Gaslight, directed by George Cukor and starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. In fact, that genre doesn’t really exist at all, in the sense that no film was produced as a ‘film noir’ – rather, that label was retrospectively assigned to a variety of films sharing similar characteristics we’ve come to recognise as ‘noirish’. And people are always turning up murdered, whether through domestic crimes of passion as in the likes of Out of the Past and Laura, or as part of a wider criminal organisation as in The Third Man and Touch of Evil.īut these types of Class A felonies are not essential to the film noir genre. ![]() The allure of ambitious financial scams, for instance, drive the criminals in Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, while The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing centre around meticulous heists. ![]() Pretty much all film noirs feature crime – and not just any crime, but the kind of big scale, headline-grabbing offence that can get you locked up for a very long time. ![]()
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