ABSTRACT
The first few minutes of New Orleans After Dark (1957) offer one of the most glaringly inept opening sequences in the American cinema of the 1950s. As the film begins, prior to the appearance of its credits, we are shown a woman in a nightclub, singing at a piano. As she sings-a song whose lyrics inventory the range of human types to be found along New Orleans’ Bourbon Street-we see a montage of images plucked from the narrative which follows, most of them involving violence against female burlesque dancers. Before the song’s conclusion, the film shifts to an oddly flat, stagy interior tableau in which a policeman bids farewell to his wife and son before heading off to the night shift. A voice-over notes that “[t]his film could be about dedicated police officers anywhere.” Brief, on-location images of downtown New Orleans follow, themselves succeeded by scenes of brief banter between patrolmen and a streetwalker; already our sense of chronology has become confused. Over more scenes of the street, the words of the film’s title and credits are superimposed, in lettering which recalls the typescripts used in scandal magazines of the time. As the credits conclude, we move into a burlesque club, and into what we may assume is the beginning of the film’s narrative.
