Alexander Culverwell's Blog
To begin with I really enjoyed the film, being the favorite of the three films that we have watched so far in this class.
I am going to talk about the use of film noir and the femme fatale.
The film noir of the film was very good in my opinion. However, I would say that film noir is not a genre. A genre is the theme of the movie such as a sci-fi, horror or comedy. In my opinion, film noir just creates the setting and the mood of the film of there being something mystical or bad going to happen. therefore, I am going to agree with Schrader in that film noir is more of a "visual style" than a genre.
The femme fatale of the film was very good. Phyliss was exactly what femme fatale means to me. She was very seductive and played the innocent wife who was having a hard tie at home with her husband. Phyliss uses her power of seductivity to real in Walter to do her dirty work. Once she had reeled Mr Neff he lost all sight of what he was meant to be doing, which ultimately ruined his life.
Another aspect of the film that I would like to talk about was how the film got through Hays code for production. The reasons for it getting past the rules were that it was adapted from a novel by James Cain and that it does not have any relation to the war. At the beginning of the film they used the date of 1938 so the war had not started by then. They had to have 23 re-writes to get this write. Because of these facts it opened up the doors for other films of that time to follow similar themes.