It is a little ironic that Joseph Stalin should see so much of him himself in the first Tsar of Russia, yet Sergei Eisenstein nevertheless takes the metaphor as a creative challenge in Ivan the Terrible, painting a vision of oppressive tyranny in bold, inflammatory strokes that stands true across centuries.
The nervous mistrust built into the duplicitous narrative and motifs in The Woman in the Window speaks to film noir’s most classical archetypes, and in further literalising the genre’s expressionist nightmares Fritz Lang delves even deeper into one naïve professor’s dreams of seduction, murder, and subterfuge.
There are few film noirs one could point to that typifies the genre more than Double Indemnity, where Billy Wilder’s gloriously expressionistic set pieces and passionately cynical writing evolves one man’s macabre curiosity into a hideous corruption of his soul, absorbing him in a murder plot almost as tightly wound as the gripping narrative that sees it slowly come apart.
“Authentic magnetism” are the words used to describe the late Laura Hunt, the target of a tragic murder, and even in death they remain truer than ever, as Otto Preminger’s methodical camerawork and staging continues to raise her up as the beguiling source of our utter fascination.
