ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the threads introduced in Chapter 1: the importance of cinema and cities for the modern world. The cycle of films addressed here, the black-and-white private-eye films made in 1940s Hollywood and set primarily in Los Angeles – called film noir by French critics – continued the aesthetic and topical features of the Weimar city film. Several of the important film noir directors were German or Austro-Hungarian and had fled Hitler’s dictatorship in Europe; consequently, this chapter, and particularly the case study of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), investigates the continuation of and breaks between the aesthetic and topical representation of the Weimar city film and film noir. Parallel to the first chapter, here I discuss Los Angeles as an allegory for modernity and also continue examining the ways in which gender functions in city films: the flâneur
and the prostitute in the Weimar city film are reincarnated in the private detective and the femme fatale.
