https://letterboxd.com/journal/columbia-noir-noirvember-retrospective/

Marya E. Gates, the lady who slapped "Noirvember" across the virtual landscape and planted in our faces forevermore, is actually a rather thoughtful critic, and her piece here at Letterboxd is resolutely progressive and feminist in its selection of noirs from Columbia Pictures. (This dovetails with the Criterion Channel reprising its "Columbia Noir" series, hosted by those two highly effective but rather effete East Coast ladies, I. Smith and F. Nehme.)

Gates's selections leave out the bigger names from the Columbia noir filmography, and traverse into the minefield of misogyny that floats in noir, conjuring up the bathroom image that still seems to dominate one side of current American politics.

I think it might have been instructive to include some of the better-known films in with the five chosen to show the pervasiveness of that gender hostility--tossing in films like DEAD RECKONING and THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI would have reinforced the theme in ways that would strengthen the overall arc of the essay.

The other thing that's missing here is a look into how "B" noir handled these issues, particularly in the 1940s when a studio like Columbia was especially busy with such productions. I'm thinking particularly of THE WHISTLER series and how several of its entries could fit into such a discussion. Gender clash in those films is not quite so foregrounded in the 1940s as in later years (it's notable that four of the five films Gates features in her essay are from the 1950s), but the "male rotter" figure that Richard Dix so often portrays in THE WHISTLER films is another way into this issue, and deserves a place at the table for having punctured through the veneer in way that rarely happens in the "A" noirs...