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Gloria Grahame: Debby Marsh In The Big Heat

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Gloria Grahame (1923 - 1981) as the ill-fated Debby Marsh in The Big Heat is ideally portrayed by Grahame in a good-girl gone bad by choosing the wicket side of life, and ultimately paying the price for liking the wrong man, who is essentially good (Bannion). “Gloria Grahame likewise introduced a new shading to the fatal woman type, playing her not as a victimizer, a cruel tyrant, but as a victim, whimpering and aching and even good-hearted. (Hirsch 157). Grahame had an extraordinary career in Hollywood as, “a femme fatale with extraordinary carnal allure, Gloria Grahame electrified moviegoers with her turns as venal, sexually aggressive women in such films as Crossfire (1947), In a Lonely Place (1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), which earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. A professional actress from childhood, Grahame began her career playing sexually confident if emotionally unstable women, and essentially repeated that role throughout the 1940s and 1950s, which marked her heyday in Hollywood. Few actresses …show more content…

“Here is where noir comes into its own, introducing themes of true moral and psychological complexity. Cornered, The Blue Dahlia, Black Angel, Phantom Lady, Deadline at Dawn, D.O.A., The Big Clock, The Big Heat are stories of manhunts conducted by investigators with personal motives” (Hirsch 173). This is an excellent brutal crime drama that demonstrates a real threat back in the 1950s with dealing with the national crime

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These are all strong characteristics of noir narrative. For instance, Norma is just delusional while Joe is caught in a moral battle of genuine love of another screenwriter and the wealth and pity of Norma. The film does use shadows most commonly when referring to Norma's past, particularly the scene where

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Even though the time periods did not match up, San Francisco and Detroit almost mirrored each other. Neither were what they are today yet, with big buildings and enormous populations; however, one thing that they did share was the fact that they had a problem with everyday crime and how some crimes were taken care of. Both Dashiell Hammet and Elmore Leonard were “tell it how it is” novelists. They shared the same message when speaking through their characters with hidden messages about the times. Corruption was exposed when talking about their fictional detectives being hard-boiled and not always playing by the rules.

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The director’s noir titles - The Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Human Desire, The Big Heat, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt are a representative sampling - share strong thematic parallels. All concern victims of fate” (Hirsch 116).

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Through his noir On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan tells an excellent tale of a misguided young man who struggles to discern good from bad, finally regretting his past and redeeming himself through sacrifice. This description is broad and applicable to many stories; it is an interpretation of the director's work, an implicit meaning. One may also say that Kazan tells the story of Terry Malloy, a young man who "does the right thing" and learns that he must sacrifice himself to take a stand to overthrow the corrupt boss, leading other workers in the right direction. As an explicit meaning, this explanation of the film focuses on the "point" of the story -- what Kazan is trying to communicate to his audience. A solid, tangible description of the film,

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2195 Words | 9 Pages

She then begins to elaborate a plan to murder her husband, convincing her new seduced lover to assist her in the plan. Film noir is known for its portrayal of female characters, specifically the femme fatale which in The Last Seduction is the focus character rather than a secondary character. I shall be looking at the film from two analytical perspectives, those being feminism and genre. Both these two approaches fit reasonably well with a film like The Last Seduction, noir films tend to focus on female characters and the transition into the early 90s brought a change to the genre now commonly referred to as ‘neo-noir’ and the representation of women had changed over the years in film, compared to the representations from the classic period of noir circa 1940s to the 1950s.

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849 Words | 4 Pages

The Maltese Falcon is a successful noir detective film from 1941. The success of the film is due to the internal actions that are accurately portrayed with cinematic composition. It consists of four goals that good directors keep in mind when filming. The techniques of keeping the image in motion, directing attention to the most important object, and the illusion of depth help the audience to focus on the important aspects of the film that overall create a suspenseful and emotional noir film experience. Directing attention to the object of greatest significance is essential in a film in order to show the audience what to focus on or pay attention to.

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You would be hard pressed to find a Noir without a femme fatale. There is usually some spider woman in the middle weaving the men of the plot to her plan. These women challenge male masculinity in Noir and are usually tamed by the protagonists or destroyed. In Vertigo we have Judy. She strings Scottie along acting like she is his friends wife and she is possessed.

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The 1940’s was the age of film noir, producing many bleak and dark movies including Charles Vidor’s Gilda. These movies were usually adapted from series noir, or black series, hard-boiled detective novels where themes of homosexuality, violence, rape, incest, drugs, abuse, etc. are common. These themes were taboo in 1940’s political economy, so a Production Code was imposed over Hollywood films (Belton 229). This Code meant that the films had to be adapted to strict regulations that prohibited them from showing controversial and inappropriate themes on screen such as homosexuality, sex, and murder. Gilda is molded to fit this political economic view of appropriateness by making the title character Gilda sexy and flirtatious without ever having

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Everything is shrouded in darkness. The dim street lights cast long shadows. The city is run by corrupt politicians, who are protected by crooked cops and mobsters. This is the world of noir. Often hard to define, noir is a genre of film that you instantly recognize whether you know it or not.

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Learning from Movies － A Case Study of Film Noir Film noir is a term that describes a style of Hollywood crime movies characterized by cynical attitudes, moral ambiguity, and low-key, black-and-white visuals. The genre’s classic period was the 1940s and 1950s. A typical film noir story often takes place in urban settings at night. The protagonist is usually morally ambiguous, cynical, disillusioned, or flawed. He may be a private detective, a cop, a gangster, a war veteran, or a petty criminal.

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Notes on the Cover Design: Ministry of Fear Ministry of Fear is one of the most underrated and overlooked films produced by Fritz Lang, especially in comparison to his later works such as The Big Heat (1953). However, it strongly demonstrates many of the characteristics that define film noir, notably through its use of lighting and psychological instability. For this reason, I have chosen to feature Ministry of Fear as the inaugural film in this film noir classics series, and have highlighted these film noir characteristics in the cover design. The first element of film noir that I chose to highlight was the lighting; more specifically, the use of dramatic contrast between light and dark, also known as clair-obscur or chiaroscuro.

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1185 Words | 5 Pages

Film noir, or neo-noir is cinematic term used to describe the heavily stylised Hollywoods crime films set in the 50s and 60s alongside The Great Depression. These generally black and white texts emphasise cynical attitudes, sexual motivations and dark themes, using the monochrome element to reflect the mood of the film. Whilst not defined by the conventions of setting and conflict, distinct characteristics of the sub-genre include recurring dark themes and dark tone. Showcasing the classic elements of the neo-noir, Sin City is a highly intense crime thriller anthology, detailing the ugly urban dystopia of Basin City; where corruption and immorality paves the streets for an underground devilish world. Following the classical hardboiled neo-noir

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1890 Words | 8 Pages

Ishiguro’s Kathy creates empathy between her and the reader by addressing the reader as a fellow clone, ruminating,” I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we had to have some form of medical every week” (Never, p. 13). Romanek perhaps emphasises empathy even further, with Kathy’s concluding voice-over acknowledging that “…perhaps we’re not that different from the people we save” (Romanek, 2005), thus highlighting an empathetic connection between victims and perpetrators – a complicated relationship that the novel does not explicitly address. Yet given that film adaptations are themselves a mimetic form – the film is a copy of the original novel – opportunities for interiority are less frequent. In Taxi Driver (1976) Martin Scorsese deploys “such hellish visions as steam rising to engulf the cab for long seconds” (Simon, 1976, p. 68) to denote the isolation of protagonist Travis Pickle.

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Greene's thrillers represent a serious attempt to establish the spy novel as an appropriate vehicle for exploring the tensions, ambiguities, darkness and sense of alienation which characterize the experience of modernity in the twentieth century. The most significant feature of formulaic narratives-spy novels, westerns, gothic romances, science fiction fantasies, detective thrillers-as defined by Warshow is self-referentiality: “One goes to any individual example of the type with very definite expectations, and originality is to be welcomed only in the degree that it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it.... It is only in an ultimate sense that the type appeals to its audience's experience of reality; much more

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