Tag: Gene Tierney
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The Pygmalion Complex in Film Noir: Benevolent Tyrants Who Create Their Ideal Women
In noir, dark characters who aim to control the vulnerable are easy to spot. Blackmailers, femmes fatale and hardened criminals exert their grip on others in unsubtle ways. But sometimes the aggressor arrives with a smile and a bouquet of roses. He may present a polished image, but his intentions are always unsavory. In “Pygmalion,”…
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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…