Content area
Full Text
As a result of the inordinate effect they have on the men around them, the powerful and seductive women who appear in film noir often seem larger than life.1 It is not surprising, then, that these women are frequently characterized by allusions to the goddesses of classical mythology who often toyed with lesser mortals. The Lady from Shanghai (Columbia, 1948; directed by Orson Welles), for example, simply juxtaposes Elsa Bannister languidly sunbathing in the foreground of a shot with the name of her yacht, "Circe," visible behind her to declare her comparable power in attracting and enchanting men, metaphorically turning them into swine who connive to outsmart one another for her favors. In Kiss Me Deadly (Parklane Productions, 1955; directed by Robert Aldrich) a woman who cannot resist the temptation of opening a box containing a nuclear device is called Pandora and cautioned that the box contains something akin to the head of the Medusa. "That's what's in the box," she is warned, "And whoever looks on her will be changed not into stone, but into brimstone and ashes." The Locket (RKO, 1947; directed by John Brahm) energizes its structure of flashbacks within flashbacks of inverting the thrust of its explicit allusion to Cassandra, the truthful prophetess whom no one would believe, to underline the power of its central female character, Nancy Blair. Though she poses for a large portrait of Cassandra, which figures prominently in the film, her lies are accepted as truth while the men who love her suffer Cassandra's fate as each unsuccessfully tries to warn her latest conquest about her deceptive and destructive nature. Not being believed, one man commits suicide, while another suffers a nervous breakdown.
Although based upon the novel Build My Gallows High, which it follows in most details, Out of the Past (RKO, 1947; directed by Jacques Tourneur) embodies its themes of sexual obsession and erotic fatalism in an extensive design program grounded in another classical allusion, one never hinted at by its literary source.2 This design program, rooted in Sandro Botticelli's well-known painting. "The Birth of Venus" (figure 1), also contributes to the film's oneiric atmosphere as it develops in relation to Kathie Moffett, the film' s femme fatale. In citing Botticelli's painting as the source...