Femme Fatale and Female Form in Film Noir Research Paper

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Act of Violence—a Film Noir Whose Advertising Promises Something for All: Pretty Gals for the Male Gaze, and Domestic Drama for the LadiesIntroductionAct of Violence is an American noir film released in 1949 by MGM Studios, directed by Fred Zinnemann. The film follows two main characters - Frank Enley, an American expat of WWII and a squad leader - and Joe Parkson, an expat himself and an underling of Frank; his once best friend turned enemy after an excruciating ordeal set into motion by Frank himself. The film follows an atypical noir formula, depicting both characters and both sides of the story at once, leaving the audience to deduce the story themselves through the scenes the characters go through. However, the marketing of Act of Violence tells another story. Throughout MUCH of the marketing material, the three female characters in the movie are featured PROMINENTLY - the extent of which can be seen through the film’s tagline “The Manhunt No Woman Could Stop”. This gross misrepresentation of the movie serves one purpose - to garner more eyes on the movie. Act of Violence markets itself as a movie that features both men and women prominently and equally, but is in reality a movie focused solely on the two male characters - with the women only being used as a vehicle to further the men’s needs. The purpose of this paper is to show that the film is marketed in a misleading way, suggesting plenty of “eye candy” for the male gaze and plenty of domestic drama for female audiences—when in reality it is a film that really exemplifies the noir genre. From Fritz Lang’s 1931 M to John Huston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon to Billy Wilder’s 1944 Double Indemnity to Hitchcock’s 1953 I Confess to Orson Welles’ 1958 Touch of Evil, noir films have always been about guilt and violence at the heart of the American Dream. They’ve always used style—light and shadow, mood and atmosphere, double crosses, blackmail, revenge, or murder and sharp dialogue to explore the criminal side of man and to represent the clash between morality and immorality in the human soul. They’ve always used B-movie melodrama and elevated it to A-level excitement by way of stylized shooting, tense pacing, and sucks-you-in storytelling. Act of Violence is no different: it exemplifies the film noir genre by heightening an otherwise B-movie melodrama through unabashed focus on the guilt and violence at the heart of one man who is haunted by a wartime decision that ruined a friendship and that in the end costs him his own life. Yet, to market the film, MGM chose to portray it as something other than what it was: it chose to portray it as a feast of eye candy and domestic drama. Why? Perhaps the answer is that film noir is a genre that appeals to a niche audience—one fascinated by the darker side of life, the deeper moral questions, and the idea that things are not always black and white. For most audiences all that’s wanted in a film is action, suspense, drama, laughs, eye candy, and heart tugs. But noir has always been about something higher, deeper, and darker—and sometimes it has used sex appeal (as Wilder did in Double Indemnity) to lure in audiences, and other times it has simply presented itself as is (as Lang did with M)—no apologies and no concerns for whether the male gaze or the yearning for domestic drama would go satisfied.

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Act of Violence is the latter kind of noir—a kind that takes B-movie melodrama and elevates it by way of visual storytelling…

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…material.ConclusionIn conclusion, in its marketing of the film, MGM made the women the main focus in the trailer, ensuring that the film would attract the male gaze, trying to appeal to men to watch the movie. The studio did not want to sell the film to audiences as a straight-up noir film about men dealing with guilt and feelings of revenge. So it went the sex appeal way and threw in some hints of domestic drama to try to get female audiences interested as well. A woman is the main focus in the poster as though the film were all about what women do to men: she is the bigger one out of the three characters on the poster, and another poster uses a damsel in distress cliché with the way she is shown in the poster—but it also plays in to the noir/mystery vibe of the film. The caption below her in the poster actually makes it seem like she might be the main focus of the movie and that she is going to find out deep secrets about her husband, which is why it is also clear that the marketing was trying to target the female audience as well. It has to have a sense of the domestic drama as well as the violent confrontation of men in order to attract both—and the easiest way to attract the male, aside from the promise of violence, is through the male gaze. The marketers likewise believed that the easiest way to attract the female audience at the time was through a pulpy “domestic drama” kind of storyline that they might read in one of their pulp magazines.Endnotes1. https://www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.html Accessed 3 Mar 20222. https://www.filmsite.org/malt.html Accessed 3 Mar 20223. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041088/mediaindex/?ref_=tt_mv_close Accessed 3 Mar 20224. https://www.ebay.com/itm/262066198880?hash=item3d045cd960:g:aGUAAOSwsB9WBiQI Accessed 3 Mar 20225. https://www.ebay.com/itm/262066198880?hash=item3d045cd960:g:aGUAAOSwsB9WBiQI Accessed 3 Mar….....

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