ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two films of the noir period – Jacques Tourneur's classic noir Out of the Past and Arthur Lubin's peripheral noir Impact – in an attempt to grasp the ways in which the dominant spaces of the genre, style or mode are articulated with its other spaces, leading each to project a particular representation of America. In Out of the Past, the nature of Bridgeport and the desirability of substitution – to say nothing of the essence of the femme fatale herself – turn out to be much more difficult to determine. In Impact, Walt Williams is a rags-to-riches businessman based in San Francisco. Both films reveal an elliptical structure, whose focal points are the noir city and small-town America, with the latter point exemplifying the invisibility and anonymity of life outside the metropolis. Out of the Past and Impact are striking in both their similarities and differences.
