Women’s Noirs in Hardboiled Books

Introduction

Below is a table with the titles of movies cited by author Mark Bould as “women’s pictures.” He says these movies “have been excluded from the film noir canon.” My table indicates whether or not the movies are cited in the discographies — or, if the book has no discography, then in the indexes — in six books that represent film noir in terms of the hardboiled paradigm.

Compare the following table with the table in the page Women’s Noirs in Reference Books.

The film that is the anomaly is Gilda, since it is included in every book in both tables. This is because its plot is unlike Bould’s other “women’s pictures.” (For more about Gilda, see Addendum below.)

The books that have an index instead of a discography sometimes may mention one of Bould’s movies just as an aside. Although I give the book credit in the table for citing the movie as a film noir, the movie may not be discussed seriously, if at all. For example, Eddie Muller speculates that audiences “couldn’t shake from their minds the seething anger they’d seen” in seven of Robert Ryan’s films, one of which is Caught (p. 142). In a discussion about Robert Mitchum, Muller refers to Undercurrent because it was on the set for “her lone trip into noir territory” that Katharine Hepburn said to Mitchum, “You can’t act” (102).

Presentation

1981: Foster Hirsch, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen (Da Capo Press)

1988: Bruce Crowther, Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror (Columbus Books Limited)

1989: J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (University of Illinois Press)

1998: Eddie Muller, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (St. Martin’s Press)

2005: Eddie Robson, Film Noir (Virgin Books, Ltd)

2007:   Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell, Encyclopedia of Film Noir (Greenwood Press)

* = The film is cited in the book.

0 = The film is not cited in the book.