Dwan: Slightly Scarlet (1956)

Although the twin innovations of Technicolor and widescreen more or less spelled the end of noir in the 1950s, there were a few last gasps that were more lurid, brutal and desperate than anything that had come before. Strictly Scarlet belongs to that moment – an extravagant fusion of suburban melodrama and noir, it’s fixated with the exact porosity between the inner city and the suburbs, as well as the exact immunity of the suburbs from the inner city, which it examines by way of the relationship between two sisters, played by Arlene Dahl and Rhonda Fleming, who get caught up with a private investigator, played by John Payne, while he’s working for the upper political-criminal echelons of San Francisco. From the very beginning, Dwan sets out to visualise whatever unimaginable Valley of Ashes might connect these parallel universes of endless, darkened rooms and lavish picture windows, passing over the highways – or internalising them – to craft tableaux that blend suburban and noir cues in bewildering, spectacular ways. Of course, that’s somewhat implicit in the very premise of a Technicolor, widescreen noir – it’s quite a violent thing to see Technicolor so shrouded in darkness, just as it’s somewhat shocking to see red seep out of black-and-white tableaux, to witness film noir bleed into film rouge. But Dwan heightens it to a hallucinatory pitch, converging suburban agoraphobia and noir claustrophobia on plushly carpeted and upholstered interiors that feel too wide and too constricted all at once, cavernously stifling as a diseased lung. Where classical noir made you feel like you were trapped in a canted or occluded camera, this new disorientation is more like being trapped inside a single dolly zoom – it brims with an entirely new, synthetic distortion of space, standing in relation to the old noir much like the new anamorphic lens stood to the old spherical lens. Less a forerunner, then, of Vertigo than of Brian de Palma’s various rediscoveries of Vertigo, it’s like watching late noir glimpse neo-noir, and the American metropolis glimpse its devolution into endless urban sprawl.