Mary Astor’s performance as the duplicitous, compulsive liar with the potential to kill set the model for later femme fatales. 1941 was a key year for Humphrey Bogart’s career, as they featured him ...in two roles which would identify him forever and stand the test of time as two of his finest performances, Samuel Spade in The Maltese Falcon and the criminal Roy Earle in High Sierra. The mystery square egged me on to look closely at things in the background of shots, and noticed (also for the first time) that in the early scene where Spade goes to the location where his partner Archer was shot dead, we see a man leaning deathly still at his window framed in the deep background of a two-shot with Spade and Detective Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond). ...the position of the window/square in relation to Spade is identical to the later shot in his apartment. In the iconic two shot of Archer and Spade at their desks after Brigid O’Shaughnessy leaves their office I was struck by how ‘boxy’ the composition was, with square objects, frames, sidings dominating the image (the windows, the file cabinet, the side of the desks, the chair opening, the certificate on the walls, etc.).
This dissertation identifies how four contemporary Iberian crime fiction novels similarly construct a paranoid reading. The project’s novels include: Secretos de Arenal by Félix González Mondroño ...(2014), Els ossos soterrats by Silvestre Vilaplana (2016), Res no és real by David Gálvez (2015), and La tristeza del samurái (2011) by Víctor del Árbol. I read the novels’ construction of paranoia as a non-delusional hypervigilance, the fear and anxiety over repeating threats or cases of violence. By narrativizing violent crimes in the twenty-first century as uncannily similar to those stemming from twentieth century authoritarianism, such novels indicate an angst over a return to Francoism. The novels’ integration of themes commonly found in works of historical fiction and memory encourage a comparative reading between past and present crimes. The novels suggest that corruption and attempts to control collective memory pave the way for repetition of crimes. This project also notes the effects of using an average citizen to play the part of sleuth and vigilante. The protagonists’ paranoia gives them the insight into solving crimes (thus allowing them to save future victims) but it also means that no one believes them and they have no authority to enact change. To further analyze these findings, I primarily use Eve K. Sedgwick’s critical theory of paranoia as a tool of differentials. Paranoia is a means of diagnosing inequalities within a society and simultaneously acts as the condition for a reparative reading. It is an active knowledge that may not lead to “the truth” but perhaps may provide a greater understanding. The novels’ constructed preoccupations over the return to Francoism implicates that Spain has not overcome certain dynamics of power and violence. Furthermore, because the novels allude to the global effects of neoliberalism, particularly its impact on the police state, these texts confront us with broad considerations about democracies. The novels’ paranoia poses questions over the state of a democracy when all aspects of social life have been commodified and determined by the possibility of violence.
Trumbo FitzGerald, Michael Ray
Film & History,
06/2016, Letnik:
46, Številka:
1
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
In 1946, Winston Churchill-at that point out of government-came to President Harry Truman's hometown, Fulton, Missouri, to deliver his famous "iron-curtain" speech, which was very close to an ...official declaration of cold war. The Hollywood Ten's nemesis is the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a right-wing pressure group formed in 1944, a veritable Who's Who of Hollywood conservatives that included Walt Disney, Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan, who makes an appearance in a newsreel clip (notably "the Alliance" sports a poster of the infamous publication Red Channels, a blackmail operation run by two former FBI agents, on its wall).
Hard-boiled is not only a literary subgenre of crime fiction, but also an expression of a typical American aesthetic. Its characters and repertoire have almost nothing in common with the European ...tradition concerning the rationalistic detective. One should understand hard-boiled fiction as part of the legacy of American modernist novel. Although the rules of the genre might seem rather traditionalistic, hard-boiled fiction has never been out of fashion since its Golden Age, because various writers from different places in the US have used it as a means to attune their style to urgent moral issues at a certain time.
For a person with lofty standards who had written serious essays and a book on Nietzsche (1915) and The Creative Will (1916), he seems to have justified his condescending to the detective novel in ...the first paragraphs of his Scribner's article in saying that different standards apply to different genres. ...he wrote, "they are unable to fulfill each other's function; and the reader who, at different times, can enjoy both without intellectual conflict, can never substitute the one for the other." Wright's view of what it was that separated mystery fiction from other forms of fiction is delineated in his Scribner's essay and in his "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories" published in American Magazine in 1928 and widely available on the Internet.
Reviews OAKLEY, HELEN
Journal of American studies,
08/2013, Letnik:
47, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The analysis of the African American Chester Himes also explores the use of the police procedural genre in his "Harlem domestic" series of the 1950s and 1960s, which subverts key aspects of the ...white-dominated hard-boiled tradition. The biography of Tony Hillerman emphasizes the important contribution made by his "Navajo" series of crime novels, which combine the police procedural genre with an exploration of problems inherent in life on the reservation, including alcohol abuse and lack of employment opportunities. Allusions to the Latino/a community are contained in the references to Latino/a detectives created by Marcia Muller and Elizabeth Linington, but it is surprising that the collection does not include any of the contemporary Chicano/a or Cuban American writers who have helped to take the crime genre in a new direction which reflects the social and psychological tensions faced by various Hispanic groups in the US today.
