a middle-aged executive's desire to change himself into a younger man (played by Rock Hudson). The style of both films is indebted to Welles, but also to Frankenheimer's experience as a brilliant director of live television.
37. Michael Rogin, 'Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies,' Representations 6 (spring 1984): 67. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
Chapter 4 1. See Jacques Rivette's comments on postwar French cinema in 'Six Characters in Search of Auteurs,' in Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 4.
2. Elsewhere, I have discussed the French auteurists in the context of an emerging postmodernism. See 'Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism,' Film Quarterly 44, no. 1 (fall 1990): 1423. For an excellent account of how auteurist criticism affected the career of Alfred Hitchcock and several other directors, see Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
3. Andrew Sams, The American Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 29. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
4. Manny Farber, Negative Space (New York: Praeger, 1971), 16. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
5. In the late 1950s, when Farber wrote about the 'underground,' the films he described were in fact playing in shabby, disreputable theaters. The film industry had become interested in spectacular, wide-screen productions, and many of the old action movies were being shown as re-releases in drive-ins or cheap urban settings.
6. The most wide-ranging attempt to explain the economic and industrial determinants for 'B film noir' is Paul Kerr, 'Out of What Past? Notes on the B Film Noir,' in The Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul Kerr (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 22044.
7. Among the top moneymaking films of 19411965, none of the classic films noirs were true industry leaders. If we construct the category loosely, its most profitable films would be Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, Gilda, Leave Her to Heaven, The Lost Weekend, Mildred Pierce, Notorious, Spellbound, Possessed, Key Largo, A Place in the Sun, Detective Story, Dragnet, Pete Kelly's Blues, The Man with a Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, Psycho, Portrait in Black, Midnight Lace, and Doctor Strangelove. (This list is based on box-office statistics in Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records [New York: Vintage Books, 1978].) In 1994, Entertainment Weekly magazine published a list of 'America's 100 All-Time Favorite Films,' which was derived from an analysis of ticket sales and video rentals. The only classical-era film on the list that is even remotely connected with the noir category is Casablanca, although the contemporary films include Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Batman, and Batman Returns (Entertainment Weekly, no. 220 [29 April 1994]: 2240). Noir also scores weakly in terms of official recognition within the industry. Leaving aside Citizen Kane, noir nominees for Academy Awards in the Best Picture category between 1941 and 1965 were The Maltese Falcon, Heaven Can Wait, Double Indemnity, Gaslight, The Lost Weekend, Spellbound, Mildred Pierce, Crossfire, Sunset Boulevard, Anatomy of a Murder, and The Hustler. The most noirlike films to actually win the award were Casablanca, The Lost Weekend, Hamlet, All the King's Men, and On the Waterfront. Noirlike winners of 'worst film' awards from The Harvard Lampoon in the same period included Spellbound, Scarlet Street, Leave Her to Heaven, The Paradine Case, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Niagara, and I, the Jury.
8. Charles P. Skouras quoted in Richard Maltby, 'The Politics of the Maladjusted Text,' in The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1993), 46. Hereafter, Cameron's work is cited parenthetically in the text.
9. Charles Korner is quoted by Anna Lewton in Joel E. Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 40. Siegel's superb book contains a great deal of useful information about production conditions in the 1940s.
10. Unless otherwise noted, production data in this paragraph and in my subsequent discussion of the 1940s and 1950s comes from Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, eds., Kings of the Bs: Working within the Hollywood System (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).
11. In The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1995), Robert B. Ray observes that one of the Hardy films, 1941's Life Begins for Andy Hardy, could be read as a film noir. 'Inevitably, therefore, to advanced students only casually interested in the Hardy movies, this film seems the most 'serious' entry in the series' (159).
12. Lea Jacobs, 'The B Film and the Problem of Cultural Distinction,' Screen 33, no.1 (spring 1992): 3.
13. For a more complete discussion of T-Men and an analysis of how Anthony Mann's career was affected by the change from B pictures to intermediates, see Cimberli Kearns, 'Making Crime Matter: The Violent Style of the 'Formative' B-Film,' USC Spectator (forthcoming 1998).
14. My Name Is Julia Ross even received a favorable review in The New Yorker. Joseph H. Lewis contributed to the notion that such films were true B movies. See Gerald Peary, 'Portrait de en cineaste l'artiste de serie 'B': Entretien avec Joseph H. Lewis,' Positif (JulyAugust 1975): 4252. (This issue of Positif also has a special section on 'le film criminel,' containing several interesting essays on American noir.)
15. For an intelligent discussion of The Argyle Secrets, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 32931.
16. Edgar G. Ulmer, quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, 'Interview with Edgar G. Ulmer,' McCarthy and Flynn, 396.
17. Perhaps because of his extremely tight schedule, Edgar G. Ulmer's cutting style is equally unorthodox. When Al places a long-distance call to Sue, we see an elaborate montage of long-distance operators and telephone lines, followed by a brief close-up of Sue holding a receiver in her hand; the entire conversation, however, is shown from Al's end of the line, and we never even hear Sue's voice. Several days later, when Al calls a second time, we see the same close-up of Sue; this time she says 'hello,' but Al hangs up.
18. Andrew Britton, 'Detour, ' in Cameron, Book of Film Noir, 17483.
19. Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place (London: BFI, 1994), 268.
20. Alain Silver and Carl Macek, 'Gun Crazy,' in Film Noir: An Encyclopedia of the American Style, rev. ed., ed. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1992), 118. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
21. A. I. Bezzerides, quoted in J. Hoberman, 'The Great Whatzit,' The Village Voice (15 March 1994): 43.
22. For a good discussion of Robert Aldrich's wavering attitude toward the film, see Edward Gallafent, 'Kiss Me, Deadly,' in Cameron, Book of Film Noir, 24046. My quote of Aldrich comes from page 240 of this essay.
23. For an interesting discussion of the film's potentially deconstructive, 'apocalyptic discourse,' see J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 198215. For a lively surrealistic reading in French, see Louis Seguin, 'Kiss Me Mike,' Bizarre, no. 2 (October 1955): 6871.
24. Slightly before this film, Vince Edwards had been an effective costar with Cleo Moore in Hit and Run (1957), a sub-James M. Cain thriller produced by low-budget auteur Hugo Hass.
25. The Martin Scorsese film is an undeniably powerful remake. In my own view, however, it suffers from a kind of overstatement, both in technical and thematic terms. For a discussion of how it relates formally to its 'precursor' texts, see Brian McFarlane, Novel into Film (London: Oxford University Press,
