The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s
The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s
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Abstract
Given that 1955, the dead center of “the Fifties,” was the year in which RKO, the “house of noir,” was sold to Desilu Studios, the home of I Love Lucy, it would appear on the face of things that classic American film noir was good and dead by midcentury. But despite the received critical wisdom about the genre, The Red and the Black proposes that the grand, rise-and-fall narrative about classic noir misprizes the way in which, via various subgenres (melodrama, semi-documentary, etc.), it dramatizes complex notions about gender and sexuality, race and family, nation and homosexuality. The clichés about 1950s noir also misrecognize the way in which, via new media and technologies (color, television, 3-D, widescreen), it effects a dynamic segue between 1940s expressionist noir and early, “modernist” neo-noir. Since the negative, stereotypical determination of Cold War noir tends to be a function of generalities about the genre and the period, The Red and the Black focuses less on “the Fifties” than on the performative contradictions of particular films and the representative cultural-political formations—anticommunism, the atomic bomb, and new media/technologies--of which they are singular “examples.” In fine, in “the Fifties,” in the age of TV and three-dimension, the femme fatale and the nuclear family, Cinemascope and Technicolor, the A-bomb and McCarthyism, the blacklist and “reds under the beds,” ‘50s noir not only existed but flourished.
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Front Matter
- Introduction: Coming Attractions, or The Particulars
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Part One ’50s Noir and Anticommunism
Robert Miklitsch -
Part Two ’50s Noir in the Atomic Age
Robert Miklitsch -
Part Three New Media and Technologies
Robert Miklitsch -
End Matter
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