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She's a paranoid woman but she's not alone. They are all over film noir, and not just in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951).
The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)
Dark Waters (1944)
Dark Waters (directed by André De Toth, 1944) doesn't follow the obvious conventions we associate with the film noir style, such as the long shadows, the urban setting, the tough guy talk, the femme fatale and the cruelty of fate.
But these weren't the only aspects of the movement, and although it's not overt in the more traditional noir crime stories of the 1940s and 1950s, Freudian psychology looms large in the cycle, and is pressed to the fore in such hits as The Woman in the Window.
Dark Waters also tips it hat to Freudian therapy, but that should be obvious from the title. It follows patterns largely established in the hit film Rebecca, and is typical of the paranoid woman film of the time.
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall at HUAC
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| Danny Kaye, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall protest at the HUAC Hearings |
Some notes on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and their 1947 trip to Washington to present their case to HUAC, on behalf of the Committee for the First Amendment.
A bitter young blogger, intent on bringing to light the connections between film noir and the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, visits his local library to see what books they have on offer on the awful years of HUAC.
In the library, this bitter young blogger is interested to note, that on the cover of both the books he find, is Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
The Birth of Film Noir
In Paris in the 1940s there were many cinema clubs at which audiences could view a good variety of films and then discuss them all night long.
The Cinematheque was for many young people a place of learning as much as it was a place of entertainment, and although they were generally small, these clubs were popular because they weren't owned by any studios and didn't feature tiresome newsreels, or the more well-known presentations that packed out the larger movie-houses.
During the Occupation of France by the Nazis, the import of Hollywood films was banned, which meant that that the French missed out on an amazingly fertile period of Amercian cinema, and this included many of the early crime-thrillers we now call film noir.