Austrian-born director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who made some of the most fascinating, and darkly disillusioned films produced in Berlin during the Weimar period, registered one ill- fated foray into Hollywood in There he directed just one film, A Modern Hero , a Pre-code tale of ruthless social climbing and sexual exploitation, but clashed with the Warner Bros studio management, [1] which reinforced his existing low opinion of American commercial cinema.
In fact, after working more happily in Paris, he returned to Germany called back, he said, for family reasons , and worked in the Berlin film industry during the second world war.
In an influential essay, the theorist and critic Vivian Sobchack invited us to understand film noir through the spaces that the characters in these movies inhabit. These are the recurrent and determinate premises of film noir and they emerge from common places in wartime and postwar American culture that, transported to the screen, gain hyperbolized presence and overdetermined meaning.
Sobchack identifies the fact that film noirs are hardly ever set inside traditional family homes, but in transient places instead β hotels, stations and bars, even prison cells. Or, in the same film, when we do see a conventional suburban house, home to detective Sergeant Bannion Glenn Ford and his wife Katie Jocelyn Brando , the potential of this building to become a family home is immediately destroyed.
A bomb planted in the car on the driveway kills Katie instantaneously. When he leaves her for another woman, she works as a waitress. After her youngest daughter dies, she opens her first restaurant. Aptly, Veda also performs as a singer in cocktail lounges. Mildred loses her family life as she provides ersatz home cooking for travelling salesmen. She experiences a cold welcome from her brother and his girlfriend. In postwar America, Sobchack argues, men and women were disturbed by their recent experiences, but perversely felt the need to settle down, to recover from the trauma of war, to reunite as families.
