 Fashion, Film Noir and Romance
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Film Noir, 7000 Clams Colt
Actress Rita Hayworth Posing in Wardrobe Columbia Pictures Bought Her for the Movie "Gilda"
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At the same time as Christian Dior was creating a nostalgic fashion and the French film industry was revitalizing itself, with period romances in which the stars appeared in dresses that seemed only slightly more exaggerated than the evening crinolines of the modern couture salons, Hollywood film noir was in its heyday.
These ambiguous movies portrayed women whose independence and sexuality was linked with betrayal, destruction and even murder. in Mildred Pierce (1946) Joan Crawford, the "clothes horse" star, was seen deserting virtuous domesticity for the dubious independence of her own business, with disastrous results (though she was retrieved for the traditional feminine role in the last reel).
In these films the costumes of the stars reinforced their ambiguity, their femme fatale quality. In Gilda (1946), for example, the high point of Rita Hayworth's performance is her rendering of the famous Put the blame on Mame. She sang the song in a classic "temptress" gown - floor-length, tight, black and strapless - and also wore long black gloves which she stripped off during the number as she used her abundant, wavy hair as a suggestive torch singer' s accessory, flinging it back or letting it hang forward over her face in a performance that approached, but never became, parody; yet the words of the song themselves commented ironically on this performance and their - overtly feminist - complaint was that when anything goes wrong men always "put the blame on Mame" - blame women.
Rita Hayworth's role in Gilda is simultaneously a treacherous two-timer and a victim whose heart is lost to the man who spurns her. She appeared in this latter aspect in a demure, coolly cut 1940s suit, while in a third (fancy-dress) persona she acted the dominatrix with whip and boots.
Film noir heroines all had this double aspect expressing the inability of the American nation to deal with the freedoms that wartirne had offered its women. For Hollywood, neither the period romanticism of French cinema nor the British return to class consciousness could have expressed adequately the mood of a pioneering but deeply conservative nation trying to impose cultural cohesion on a land of enormous diversity, suddenly burdened with world dominance in the threatening climate of the atormc bomb and the paranoia of the "Communist menace".
Films noirs expressed some of the resulting unease. They were male fantasies, in which stars such as Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum investigated a terrifying hole in their knowledge of the past. These investigative heroes were often thinly disguised war veterans, anxious about what either they had done, or their women had done, during the war, during the Absence that the war had been. Themes of personal betrayal, of sterility within marriage and sexual terror without, displaced anxieties such as national treachery and symbolized the spiritual wasteland of a culture in which personal advancement seemed to be the only god.
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