A woman’s place in film noir is evilly clear — she’s the seductress who tempts the man into his own destruction — although often she plays a stronger role as the heroine, a seeker hero of her own, solving a crime on behalf of an imprisoned or incapacitated male.
Even if they are irresistibly destructive, the women of noir are never static symbols of male repression — they’re intelligent, powerful, and overly-sexual . The File on Thelma Jordon is Double Indemnity meets Pitfall — disguised as a well-presented story of marital infidelity. And it has Barbara Stanwyck in the lead, bidding for film noir immortality.
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Thelma Jordon is in love with a jewel thief, Tony Laredo.
Indeed — Barbara Stanwyck may lay claim to being the first lady of noir — certainly many have placed her on this pedestal, citing her sound film noir output from the 1940s and 1950s:
Double Indemnity (1944)
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947)
Cry Wolf (1947)
Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)
The File On Thelma Jordan (1950)
No Man of Her Own (1950)
The Furies (1950)
Clash By Night (1952)
Witness to Murder (1954)
Crime of Passion (1957)
By the time noir was dying out at the end of the 1950s, there were a few more female types on display in Hollywood’s films — the sex goddess as typified by Marilyn Monroe — the demure and virtuous wife, as seen in Jane Wyman, and then there were these women which some people describe as ‘professional virgins’ — a la Doris Day.
WENDELL COREY
Like Ronald Reagan, who was then a Democrat, the Republican Corey was interested in politics. He was elected to membership on the board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild and served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1961 to 1963. As a Republican, he was elected to the City Council in Santa Monica, California, in 1965. He made a bid for the Republican nomination to contest a seat in Congress in 1966, but was defeated in the primary.
How to hold a woman in film noir?
Richard Rober as Tony Laredo
The impetus for all of these dark movies, incidentally, most of which was made in Siodmak’s happy years at Universal (1943 – 1948), was one of the first films he directed in America — the atmospheric although fairly mundane Son of Dracula (1943), which like the films he had made in France while in exile from Nazi Germany, looked good without being very expensive — and this was a useful habit in the era of film noir.
The File on Thelma Jordon is now open for all to see at YouTube. If you’re collecting noir then it’s a must, and although it doesn’t come with hoods, tough talk and shadows, it falls into that more nebulous and yet important category of domestic noirs, which chart the dramatic failure of the post-War male, and revel in his weaknesses and confusion.