Tag: Everett Sloane
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Noir mirrors: A broken world reflected in shattered glass
In the often disjointed world of film noir, a mirror is seldom just a mirror. Those silvery reflective surfaces can suggest a lot of things: paranoia, dual personalities and narcissism, to name just a few. They also distort reality. Facing mirrors may reflect the image of a figure into infinity, suggesting a splintered, dissociated personality.…
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Crime tourists, Part I: Yanks behaving badly in foreign lands
Orson Welles, ‘The Third Man’ (1949). By Paul Parcellin Film noir loves morally sketchy locales — the kind of places where law and order is on life support and police can be manipulated like a vending machine. Like America’s Wild West, post-war Europe and Asia’s rubble strewn roadways were a magnet for drifters, bootleggers, grifters…