Angelus News | June 30, 2023 | Vol. 8 No 13

DESIRE LINES
HEATHER KING
Where crime doesn’t pay
A scene from the 1955 film “No Man’s Woman.” | SCREENSHOT VIA YOUTUBE
“Each of us is in some way or another,
and in succession, a criminal and a
saint.”
— Catholic novelist Georges
Bernanos (1888-1948)
My tastes range wide in movies,
but top place goes to film
noir, described by the Oxford
Languages Dictionary as “a style or
genre of cinematographic film marked
by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and
menace.”
“The term was originally applied (by
a group of French critics) to American
thriller or detective films made in the
period 1944–54 and to the work of
directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz
Lang, and Billy Wilder.”
In “Dark City: The Lost World of
Film Noir” (Running Press Adult,
$20.99), San Francisco-based Eddie
Muller (the “Czar of noir”) explores
several tropes of the genre: “Vixenville”
(the femme fatale), “The City
Desk” (newspaper grift), the psych
ward “Thieves’ Highway” (crime on
the road), “The Big House” (prison
movies).
Hollywood was the heartbeat of film
noir, with many of them shot in the
studios, if not the streets, stores, and
homes of LA. I can’t get enough of
the tough guys in hats, the dames with
cinched-in waists, the sinister, bougainvillea-overhung
alleys, the winding car
chases up into the hills, the venal urges,
the leering close-ups, the laughably
convoluted plots.
A number of lesser-known favorites
can be found free on YouTube: “No
Man’s Woman” (1955), for example.
In the opening scene, platinum
blonde “art dealer” Carolyn Grant (the
great Marie Windsor, “Queen of the
Bs”) is breezing along what looks to be
the Pasadena Freeway south. She’s at
the wheel of a snazzy cream-colored
convertible with big fins, the top down,
a pricey painting in the back seat,
and her lover, an art critic who she’s
stringing along in order to advance her
career, riding shotgun.
When the wind starts blowing off the
wrapping paper that’s protecting the
“René” they’ve just bought, she pulls
over so the guy can adjust it. “How
could I get along without you, Wayne,”
she purrs.” “How can I ever repay
you?”
Wayne pulls her close for a long kiss,
but Carolyn playfully pushes him away.
“That’s all, darling. After all, Harlow
still expects me at six.”
“Can’t we forget about Harlow?”
growls Wayne.
34 • ANGELUS • June 30, 2023