RARA-AVIS: Nukes, Noir, and Hitchcock

Mbdlevin@aol.com
Fri, 4 Dec 1998 21:14:02 EST I

<< Recently Jason Boog wrote
"I watched the movie Mulholand Falls this weekend, and I thought the
combination of noir and dread of nuclear weapons was great. I was
wondering if anyone knows of any more films or stories or novels that
combine those two elements?"

In the early '50s Dick Powell, who'd starred in a lot of the best '40s
noirs, directed a movie called *Split Second* about a group of people
held hostoage in an area that was about to be the center of a nuclear
bomb test. The style was more Hitchcokian than noir (although
Hitchcock tended toward noir a few times), but still might be
something you'd be interested in. - Jim Doherty >>

Hitchcock--noirish here and there--pays some attention and some lip service to
nuclear concerns, if I remember correctly. In Notorious, isn't the McGuffin
(the powder in the wine bottle) some sort of uranium or something (I may not
be remembering this correctly)? More fundamentally, however, and less
classically noir, The Birds is a Cold War film about nuclear annihilation.

Doug
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.