Pulp Education #4 -- These forgotten female crime writers had no time for femme fatales or dowdy housewives

by Brigit Katz

When detective Philip Marlowe first encounters Vivian Regan in The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler’s beloved 1939 detective novel, she has draped herself provocatively over a sofa, beautiful legs on full display. Marlowe immediately sizes her up as “trouble.” Vivian’s husband has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and she asks far too many questions for Marlowe’s liking. “I don’t mind your showing me your legs,” he says. “They’re swell legs, and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance … But don’t waste your time trying to cross examine me.”

This framing of the genders — dastardly dames, inscrutable P.I.s — is typical of classic American crime fiction, which by and large was written by men, about men, for the purpose of reaffirming masculine identity in the wake of two devastating world wars. Starting in the 1920s, the likes of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler pioneered the now-archetypal hardboiled detective, who moved through sordid cityscapes with gruff cynicism and determined solitude. The most interesting women characters inevitably emerged as femme fatales: sultry, dangerous, and never a true match for the detective’s steely resolve.

Many readers may not know that while male giants of the genre were writing about hardened gumshoes and fiery femmes, a slew of female authors were producing rollicking crime fiction that often presented a very different perspective on the genders. These books were well-received in their day, but faded into obscurity as time wore on. Fortunately, a recently published anthology brings the forgotten foremothers of American crime fiction back into the spotlight. Women Crime Writers collects little-known novels that were written by female authors in the 1940s and 50s. The anthology’s origins are, appropriately, rooted in a bit of mystery.

Read the full article: http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2015/12/02/these-forgotten-female-crime-writers-had-no-time-for-femme-fatals-or-dowdy-housewives/

Pulp Education #3 -- No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir -- The Femme Fatale

by John Blaser

Of the three types of noir women, the femme fatale represents the most direct attack on traditional womanhood and the nuclear family. She refuses to play the role of devoted wife and loving mother that mainstream society prescribes for women. She finds marriage to be confining, loveless, sexless, and dull, and she uses all of her cunning and sexual attractiveness to gain her independence. As Janey Place points out, "She is not often won over and pacified by love for the hero, as is the strong heroine of the forties who is significantly less sexual than the film noir woman." 26 She remains fiercely independent even when faced with her own destruction. And in spite of her inevitable death, she leaves behind the image of a strong, exciting, and unrepentant woman who defies the control of men and rejects the institution of the family.

The classic femme fatale resorts to murder to free herself from an unbearable relationship with a man who would try to possess and control her, as if she were a piece of property or a pet. According to Sylvia Harvey, the women of film noir are "[p]resented as prizes, desirable objects" 27 for the men of these films, and men's treatment of women as mere possessions is a recurring theme in film noir. In a telling scene from an early noir thriller, I Wake Up Screaming (1941), three men sit in a bar lamenting their unsuccessful attempts to seduce the femme fatale, clearly resenting her inexplicable refusal to be possessed. When one man complains that "Women are all alike," another responds simply, "Well, you've got to have them around — they're standard equipment."

Read the full article: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/noir/np05ff.html

Pulp Education #1 -- FILM NOIR AND THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE HERO

by John J. Blaser and Stephanie L.M. Blaser

The American hard-boiled detective film began to appear in the early 1940s, providing an alternative to the traditional murder mystery that had dominated detective films throughout the silent era and into the 1930s. These films represented an artistic effort to break the rules of the game laid down by countless movies about Sherlock Holmes and Philo Vance, and by the ongoing "Thin Man" series. Embracing the techniques and outlook of film noir, which the hard-boiled detective film would come to represent, the people who made these films set out to create on the motion picture screen a different kind of world, and to provide it with a darker, more cynical interpretation.

The makers of this new type of detective film seemed to recognize that if they were going to create a new cinematic view of the world, they also would have to create a completely new hero to exist in that world. Yet, they did not all create the same type of hero, nor did the film noir hero remain static during his entire run. Instead, the hard-boiled detective films of the 1940s supplied a surprisingly diverse set of heroes, each offering a variation on the common theme of crime and detection in the dark urban scene.

Although the new hard-boiled detective genre may seem to have emerged already fully developed in The Maltese Falcon (Warner Bros., 1941), many of the elements that in Maltese Falcon Humphrey Bogart established the archetypal film noir detective-hero. The Maltese Falcon (1941) combination would define this and later films can be found separately in earlier films. Probably the most obvious as well as the most influential example of early film noir is Citizen Kane (RKO, 1941). Among other contributions to the hard-boiled detective genre, it perfected and used on a grand scale such techniques as high-contrast lighting (revealing certain characters in bright, almost washed-out light, while casting others into almost total shadow, for example); low-angle camera setups (making the subject seem taller and more powerful); and deep focus (a new technology at the time, allowing the camera to maintain in focus objects and characters in both the background and foreground in the same shot). Citizen Kane, along with Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (United Artists, 1940), also used the narrative technique of introducing a central character after his death, then reconstructing the events of his life to develop his character through the rest of the film. Variations on this method would later be used in many of the hard-boiled detective films.

Read the full article: http://www.filmnoirstudies.com/essays/detective_hero.asp