Murderers often not brought to justice.
Key issues:
- doomed love
- gambling
- jeopardy in life
- confusions
- mistaken identity
- wrong place wrong time
- survival despite the odds
- anxiety caused by the system
- ‘Things become endurable yet you must endure.’
- Why me?
- For no reason!
Themes:
- Love, betrayal, murder
- Twisted love
- The darker side of human nature
- Obsession
- Fall guy caught in a nightmare.
Changes:
- B movies, low budget became A movies with bigger budgets.
- Hays code ensured implicit sexuality
- Technology enabled outside locations
- Became more political – reflected the concerns of the time: gangsters, mobsters, communists…
- Moved towards suburbanisation.
- Colour
- Showed the inner workings of the mobs or gangster network.
Directors:
- Fritz Lang
- Hitchcock
- Scorsese
- Abraham Polonsky
- Paul Schrader
Editors:
- Katherine Bigelow
Links with social issues:
- Drink, drugs and social inequity in the 40s and 50s
- Prohibition
- Empowered women
- War vets returning to insecurity; continuation of war time trauma in a domestic situation.
- Nuclear war
- Communism vs. democracy
Other genres and film styles:
- Borrowed cinema vérité documentary techniques
- German Expressionism
Conventions
- Stark shadows – extreme
- People controlled by events
- Low key lighting
- Venetian blinds
- Running through shadowed city streets
- Terse dialogue
- Minimalism
- Deep focus (fore and background in equal focus)
- Wide angle lenses – often actors talked to the backs of heads meant cameras didn’t have to move so few close ups.
- Femmes fatales – seen in low angle representing her power; violent women seen as attractive but dangerous; smoking.
- Fragmentation vs. long shot.