I leave it to others to discuss whether WEIRD WOMAN is a film noir--the horror overtones are strong enough in it that I'd probably chalk it up as more of a hybrid.
Voice-overs in classic noir + Weird Woman notes
Posted by Solomon on 10/19/2019, 10:44 am
A list made by ? that's on IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?genres=film-noir&keywords=voice-over-narration&sort=release_date,asc
Has the list-maker got it all right? All these have voice-overs? And are there more?
I'd add Calling Dr. Death (1943) and Weird Woman (1944) for starters. The former has been discussed before. The latter has Lon Chaney questioning his belief in rationality v. superstition. He feels he's going a bit mad when superstition seems to be winning. Much of this inner turmoil is in voice-over. That part of the film could be a neo-noir thing. As for being noir, I vote yes. It's not a mystery. We know that Evelyn Ankers is a femme fatale who engineers a suicide and encourages a violent confrontation between Chaney and a young guy who thinks Chaney is a romantic rival for Lois Collier's affections. Elizabeth Russell, a Val Lewton player, has a good part as a pushy faculty wife. Her ambition has set the stage for Ankers' driving Ralph Morgan over the edge. The film glimpses college faculty intrigue. Anne Gwynne is the weird woman, brought up to believe in native rituals and tagged a witch by the ambitious faculty wives. Being wife to the rationalist sociologist played by Chaney, there is a built-in conflict. The marriage is traditional in that, against her resistance and warnings, Chaney takes the upper hand and destroys her good luck amulet, at which point, his life immediately starts falling apart.
City Streets (1931)
Le roman d'un tricheur (1936) Sacha Guitry dark comedy, possibly the earliest sustained usage of the technique
Rebecca (1940) 8.1
1. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)6.9
I Wake Up Screaming (1941)
Calling Dr. Death (!943)
Weird Woman (1944)
2. Double Indemnity (1944)8.3
Laura (1944) 7.9
Murder, My Sweet (1944) 7.5
3. Experiment Perilous (1944)6.4
4. The House on 92nd Street (1945)6.7
Detour (1945)
5. Night Editor (1946)6.7
Decoy (1946) 6.8
The Blue Dahlia (1946)
Gilda (1946)
Boomerang! (1947) 7.2
The Red House (1947) 6.7
The Arnelo Affair (1947) 5.8
Possessed (!947)
T-Men (1947)
Dark Passage (1947)
6. Dead Reckoning (1947)7.1
7. Repeat Performance (1947)6.8
8. The Long Night (1947)6.7
9. Kiss of Death (1947)7.5
10. The Lost Moment (1947)6.9
11. The Gangster (1947)6.7
12. Out of the Past (1947)8.0
13. The Lady from Shanghai (1947)7.5
They Won't Believe Me (1947) 7.2
14. Call Northside 777 (1948)7.3
15. The Return of the Whistler (1948)6.4
16. He Walked by Night (1948)7.2
Raw Deal (1948)
Race Street (1948) 6.5
Canon City (1948) 6.5
Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) 7.3
17. The Crooked Way (1949)6.7
18. Manhandled (1949)6.7
19. The Third Man (1949)8.1
20. Stray Dog (1949)7.9
21. All the King's Men (1949)7.5
22. Tension (1949)7.3
The Judge (1949) 6.0
The Story of Molly X (1949) 6.6
23. No Man of Her Own (1950)7.4
24. Quicksand (1950)6.6
25. Appointment with Danger (1950)6.6
26. Sunset Blvd. (1950)8.4
27. The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)6.4
Side Street (1950) 7.1
Highway 301 (1950) 6.7
28. The Enforcer (1951)7.3
29. I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951)6.2
30. Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951)6.7
Native Son (1951, Argentina) 6.2
31. Without Warning! (1952)6.7
32. The Steel Trap (1952)6.9
Confidence Girl (1952) 5.9
33. Jeopardy (1953)6.8
34. A Blueprint for Murder (1953)6.8
35. The Bigamist (1953)6.7
No Escape (1953) 5.5
Terror Street (1953) 5.9
36. Down Three Dark Streets (1954)6.8
Private Hell 36 (1954)
37. Big House, U.S.A. (1955)6.7
38. House of Bamboo (1955)6.8
39. Killer's Kiss (1955)6.7
40. Dementia (1955)6.8
Women's Prison (1955) 6.5
41. The Wrong Man (1956)7.4
Des gens sans importance aka People of No Importance (1956, France)
The Killing (1956)
42. The Unholy Wife (1957)5.7
She Played With Fire (1957, UK) 6.8
The Tijuana Story (1957) 52
Baby Face Nelson (1957) 6.3
Hell's Five Hours (1958) 5.7
Le dos au mur aka Back to the Wall (1958, France)
Blast of Silence (1961)
Mike's added context--the article he mentions is by academician Paul Haacke and is entitled "The Melancholic Voice-Over in Film Noir."
I found an article in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Winter 2019) that adds a great deal. It's entirely about noir, voice-overs and related techniques and what they convey. This article has its theories, such as "Having conceptualized the melancholic voice-over as a form of subjective narration about a lost past or object of attachment as well as an anguished loss of stable, rational selfhood, we may break it down further in terms of testimonial witnessing and confessional guilt..."
"Regardless of their initial source or ultimate fate, such vocalizations of melancholic loss, cynical complicity, and tragic irony are typical of film noir. Although they dwell most of all on the grave, disturbing pasts of their protagonists, they reverberate within a larger discourse of testimony, confession, and accountability that emerged in public culture following the extreme violence of World War II and the Holocaust. And as this article has shown, it was the development of the melancholic voice-over in film noir that helped enable the historical affect at the heart of this discourse to be registered in the years that followed. This device transferred a generalized, intersubjective sense of trauma, guilt, and grief to listening audiences, one that may well continue to haunt us for as long as such dark films continue to be seen and heard."
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