Decadent Noir (10 October 2024 - 13 March 2025)

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Goldsmiths, University of London
RHB Cinema (formerly the Curzon Cinema), 18.00 - 21.00 GMT

For 2024-25, the Decadent Film Club is delighted to present Decadent Noir, a stream of films exploring the interrelationship between decadence and Hollywood noir, curated by Prof. David Weir.

Each movie in the season will be presented by a film expert or aficionado and will be followed by a discussion and Q&A.

The Film Club will meet in person in the RHB Cinema (formerly the Curzon Cinema) at Goldsmiths, 18.00 - 21.00 GMT.

Tickets are FREE, but booking is required.

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Screening Schedule

Thursday 10 October: Laura (1944), dir. Otto Preminger (Rescheduled for 7 November)

Thursday 24 October: The Big Sleep (1946), dir. Howard Hawks

Thursday 21 November: They Live by Night (1948), dir. Nicholas Ray

Thursday 5 December: Detour (1945), dir. Edgar G. Ulmer

Thursday 23 January: In a Lonely Place (1950), dir. Nicholas Ray

Thursday 13 February: Sunset Boulevard (1950), dir. Billy Wilder

Thursday 6 March: Touch of Evil (1958), dir. Orsen Welles

Thursday 13 March: Singapore Sling (1990), dir. Nikos Nikolaidis

Tickets are FREE, but booking is required.

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Decadence and Film Noir

Introduction and Screening Notes by David Weir

The term film noir originated in Paris after World War II when screening of American movies that had been prohibited during the Occupation was finally allowed. Around the same time, in1946, Gallimard began publication of a new series of pulp fiction crime novels branded Série noire. Because the convoluted plots of films like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944)—both screened in Paris in 1946—had been adapted from American crime novels not unlike the Serie noire narratives, the films became noir by analogy after the fact; that is, neither Huston nor Wilder set out to make a film noir.

The connection of noir with decadence is a critical construction, of course, but there are several rationales for making the connection. First, film noir comes across as a popular culture manifestation of decadent critique. Much as Oscar Wilde’s society comedies satirize the British aristocratic class or J.-K. Huysmans’ À rebours ridicules both the declining aristocracy and the ascendant bourgeoisie, film noir often involves an implicit critique of middle-class values in mid-century America. Time and again, film noir reveals the darker side of the sunny optimism of post-war prosperity, shows the cost of conformism on the human spirit, and exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of an American system that promoted patriarchy as the norm and consumer capitalism as the natural order of things. Noir also has additional thematic and stylistic continuities with decadent culture, so long as those continuities are understood as pop-culture expressions of canonical decadence. The tone of noir is persistently pessimistic, a ‘philosophical’ attitude reflected not only in the dialogue of the hard-boiled, world-weary detective but also in the mise en scène, notably the chiaroscuro lighting design, a cinematic style that harmonized with that of Weimar filmmakers forced into exile in 1933 (or earlier) who adapted their expressionist aesthetic to Hollywood and found work directing films now called noir. Another point of connection between noir and decadence is the femme fatale, who tends to be more mythic than real (Medusa, Salomé, Giaconda) in the literature of decadence. In noir, the sexually alluring woman often aligns herself with the criminal world and seduces the hero intent on solving the crime, although, strictly speaking, the noir universe is more ambiguous, morally speaking, than that formulation suggests.

Many of the early Hollywood screenwriters were steeped in decadent literature, one factor behind the worldly dialogue in most noirs, such as the line Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson) delivers about her worthless boyfriend in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944): ‘He’s no good. But he’s what I want.’ Another factor is the Production Code that went into effect in 1934 intended to ensure that Hollywood would produce morally acceptable family entertainment. Screenwriters delighted in skirting the boundaries of decency to avoid censorship by writing dialogue filled with double entendre, such as the wildly suggestive ‘horseracing’ exchange between Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) and Vivian Sternwood (Lauren Bacall) in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946). Dandyism is another stylistic element common to decadence and noir, which in noir takes several forms. Sometimes it is the private detective who worries over his tie and cuffs, his dandyism forming a stylistic contrast to the shlumpy cops with whom he competes on the case. But it is also true that a number of noir villains are also dandies, such as Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in Laura, a decadent aesthete by any measure (he quotes Ernest Dowson’s poetry). Lydecker is also implicitly gay, the concord of villainy and queerness reflective of the homophobia of the times. Another example is the dandified Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon; not all of these queer characters are villainous—such as the butch lesbian masseuse in Nicolas Ray’s In a Lonely Place—but the sense of menace that attaches to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ is often palpable.

Finally, the noir cycle itself follows a decadent trajectory, with the noir hero undergoing a transformation from the tough but decent private detective Sam Spade (Bogart) in The Maltese Falcon or the earnest—and honest—police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) in Laura to the morally monstrous lawman, Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), in Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), a film that also doubles down on the already mannerist visual style of noir.

Thursday 10 October: Laura (1944), dir. Otto Preminger (Rescheduled for 7 November)

Introduced by Jessica Gossling

Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), based on a pulp crime novel published in 1942 by Vera Caspary, connects to the decadent tradition mainly by way of the character Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a newspaper columnist and radio personality in New York who fancies himself an arbiter of both style and society. One critic calls the character ‘an effeminate, Wildean aesthete’ caught in a plot that requires him to be ‘a jealous heterosexual with a Pygmalion complex’,  since he is the one who transforms Laura (Gene Tierney) from an ordinary ad designer into a successful businesswoman and socialite. The dandified Lydecker is only one of several evident evocations of Oscar Wilde, along with the witty dialogue (‘I’m not kind. I’m vicious. It’s the secret of my charm’) and, above all, the large painting of Laura that hangs in her living room. Not since The Picture of Dorian Gray has a framed portrait played such an outsize role in a narrative that combines aesthetics and decadence. The painted likeness of Laura later becomes a source of obsessive interest for the police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) charged with finding Laura’s murderer, so much so that Lydecker warns him that he might wind up in a psychiatric ward: ‘I don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse.’ Later in the film, we hear the recorded voice of Lydecker reading Ernest Dowson’s 1896 poem, ‘Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam’ [The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long], on his radio program while the man himself engages in action for which that poem seems appropriate commentary. The British decadent references result mainly from the scriptwriter Samuel Hoffenstein’s adaptation, but he must have been inspired to take things in a decadent direction by Caspary’s novel, where Lydecker is already a dandy and an aesthete. Caspary also has Lydecker and McPherson trading comments about Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (in the film, McPherson is not so cultured). A different kind of decadence is suggested by the characters Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), both of whom could have stepped out of the pages of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) because their aversion to work combined with their cultivation of high society manners signifies their elevated taste. And even though Lydecker does write for a living, he too indulges in conspicuous consumption as an indicator of social standing. In fact, the main reason he supports Laura’s career seems to be so he can turn the woman into an aesthetic object to confirm his refined tastes when he is seen with her in public.

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Thursday 24 October: The Big Sleep (1946), dir. Howard Hawks

Introduced by Larry Shillock

Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946), based on the Raymond Chandler detective novel of 1939, is the second Hawks feature pairing Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Her sensational, sultry-voiced debut in To Have and Have Not (1944) as Marie ‘Slim’ Browning includes the unforgettable moment with Harry ‘Steve’ Morgan (Bogart) when she pauses at the door of Morgan’s apartment, turns, and tells him the only thing he needs to do if he wants her is whistle: ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and … blow.’ (For the record, Hawks and his wife Nancy sometimes called each other ‘Steve’ and ‘Slim’.) While they were working together on To Have and Have Not, the 45-year-old (married) Bogart and the 19-year-old Bacall began an affair; they married before The Big Sleep wrapped. This Hollywood gossip matters because the on-screen chemistry between Bogart’s Philip Marlowe and Bacall’s Vivian Rutledge is so palpable that Hawks all but jettisoned Chandler’s plot in order to exploit that chemistry, not that the plot of the novel was all that coherent to begin with. On set, Bogart wanted to know who committed one of the murders. The screenwriters (William Faulkner (yes, that William Faulkner), Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman) had no idea; so someone got in touch with Chandler—he had no idea, either. The plot problems were ‘resolved’ by turning the film into a series of sexy scenes between Bacall and Bogart, and, sometimes, between other women and Bogart, whose Marlowe is a bit of a pick-up artist (e.g., the scene in the Acme Bookstore). Some critics do use the terms decadent and decadence to describe the film, much as Paul Bourget uses them to describe Charles Baudelaire’s poetry or as Friedrich Nietzsche does to critique literary decadence more generally: ‘The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.’ The best decadent literature eschews formalist unity for a uniform sensibility, however disaffected, pessimistic, or ironic. Likewise with The Big Sleep, which leaves narrative clarity behind and puts visual and other pleasures in the foreground. Proof of this point is that an early version of the film screened for a preview audience included a scene in which Marlowe explains everything, Agatha Christie style. This scene was cut and replaced with the ‘horseracing’ scene. More straightforward decadent elements in the film include the hothouse flower scene early on; Vivian’s ‘nymphomaniac’ sister, Carmen (Martha Vickers); and the utter absence of anything natural whatsoever. Shot entirely on the Warners lot, the film may sometimes show the viewer trees and rain, but it’s all fake.

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Thursday 21 November: They Live by Night (1948), dir. Nicholas Ray

Introduced by Imogen Sara Smith

Nicolas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) poses problems for anyone seeking to align film noir with the decadent tradition because it is so innovative for the time—or maybe not, since one of the things that distinguishes decadence in broad terms is the cultural nexus of exhaustion and renewal. In 1957, Jean-Luc Godard summarized the history of film thus: ‘There was theater (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth, there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.’ What he means is that, before Ray, directors understood their art as the filmic expression of some other art, whereas Ray is a pure filmmaker. Certainly, there is a cinematic self-consciousness about They Live by Night that seems entirely new: in the dreamy prologue of the film, the doomed lovers Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) appear startled by the opening title (and the change in music) and seem to read the title along with the audience. The contrast with a studio noir like The Big Sleep is striking: the opening helicopter shots of a car racing through the countryside is the first of many location shots showcasing Ray’s cinematic vision—that, and the nighttime cinematography (this really is film noir). The film turns into a lovers-on-the-run story, as Bowie and Keechie try to elude both the police and Bowie’s former ‘gang’, T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen) and Chickamaw (Howard Da Silva), a pair of small-time, low-life criminals who rob banks in rural Texas. As the film opens, the gangmates have just escaped from prison, where Bowie was jailed for a murder he may not have actually committed when he was a teenager but for which he was convicted—without due process (or so Bowie thinks). He does seem innocent (just look at him!), but he is drawn into the life of crime as the getaway driver for T-Dub and Chickamaw when they pull their heists. Bowie meets Keechie when the gang holes up at the run-down service station owned by her alcoholic father, Mobley (Will Wright), Chickamaw’s brother. When they run off together, their relationship is romantic all right, but it is a hard-edged romanticism. They have to get married, not so much because Keechie gets pregnant, but because the Motion Picture Production Code required it. Ray’s handling of the marriage ceremony says a lot about what he thought of the Code’s insistence on the decency of the institution of marriage. The source novel for the film is Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us (1937), a title explained in the novel by T-Dub’s frequent assertion that powerful people in Depression-era American ‘are thieves just like us’: bankers, ‘Them Laws’ (i.e., the police), druggists (!), and politicians. This socially decadent context makes an innocent criminal like Bowie a true outsider.

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Thursday 5 December: Detour (1945), dir. Edgar G. Ulmer

Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945) is a B-movie classic that has attained cult status among noir aficionados for several reasons. First, the performances: Tom Neal as the handsome but hapless Al Roberts is almost archetypally melancholy; and the aptly named Ann Savage breaks the mould of the femme fatale as Vera, whose feral depravity has a proto-feminist feel to it, once you subtract the lunatic bitchiness. Second, the narrative: Al’s (unreliable) flashback voiceover takes us through a tale so fraught with doom at every turn you wonder why the movie wasn’t titled The Man Who Couldn’t Catch a Break. Third, the production: that Ulmer managed to make something so artful and compelling out of such meagre resources is nothing short of miraculous. Ulmer made his low-budget movies for the Poverty Row studio PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), a situation that forced creative solutions to limited production resources, such as darker-than-usual chiaroscuro lighting and fog machines to imply sets where none existed. The film reportedly had a two-to-one shooting ratio, which means the final cut works out to half the available film stock, or a maximum of two takes per shot. For comparison, consider that Hollywood films during the classic period (1930–1959) generally had a shooting ratio of 10:1. Viewers can be forgiven for thinking that they have somehow been transported to England in a hitchhiking scene when, all of a sudden, cars and trucks are being driven on the left side of the road and steering wheels are on the right of the vehicles. Ulmer probably flipped the print to preserve the right-to-left screen direction established earlier by a map that appears on the screen, as Al travels west from New York (to the right on the map) to Los Angeles (on the left), because he didn’t have enough film stock to reshoot the scene. Like almost all the European émigré noir directors, Ulmer was Jewish, a fact that has led a recent critic to make a compelling case for ‘Jewish émigré noir’ whereby Ulmer and others employ the genre to express a specifically Jewish set of experiences. The noir hero—or antihero—is always an outsider, regardless of which side of the law he is on, and sometimes, as in Detour, he is an outsider who must keep his identity hidden, a circumstance that resonates with Jewish experience, whether in interwar Germany or in post-war America. To all this crypto-Judaism can be added the name of the character in the 1939 novel by Martin M. Goldsmith on which the film is based: Aaron Rothenberg, which he changes to the only slightly less Jewish sounding Alexander Roth. When this Al sits down to a steak dinner on someone else’s dime, he thinks: ‘It tasted like the manna must have tasted to the starving Jews wandering around in the wilderness for God knows how long.’Even without this subtext, the film offers a very different take on the open road as an American metaphor for individual freedom and limitless possibilities, as the opening title shot of the road receding behind a moving vehicle suggests. This is America à rebours.

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Thursday 23 January: In a Lonely Place (1950), dir. Nicholas Ray

Introduced by Imogen Sara Smith

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, is smack in the middle of the classic noir cycle (1941–1958). This centrality is not just chronological: critics recognize it as one of the best noirs, yet it’s atypical in a lot of ways: no flashbacks, the central character is neither a criminal nor a detective, there’s no femme fatale, and there is not a lot of dramatic noir lighting, except for a few shots—one in particular—where the key light on Bogart’s face connotes intense menace. The film is adapted from a 1947 novel about a serial killer by the crime writer Dorothy B. Hughes. About the only thing the novel and the film have in common are the names of the characters: Dix Steele (Bogart), a Hollywood screenwriter who despises the studio system; Laurel Gray (Grahame), an actress who lives in the same apartment complex as Dix; Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), a Beverly Hills police detective who served under Dix in WWII; and Sylvia (Jeff Donell), Brub’s wife. In a Lonely Place is a hybrid of at least two Hollywood genres in addition to film noir: one, the backstudio movie about the film industry itself (compare Sunset Boulevard and All about Eve—both 1950—though Eve is about Broadway, hence backstage, not backstudio); and two, the woman’s picture. The scene with Laurel and Sylvia where Sylvia says, ‘Why don’t you talk to him?’ is especially evocative of this type of film; likewise the scenes with Laurel’s masseuse, Martha (Ruth Gillette), though Martha’s evident lesbianism is atypical of most woman’s pictures. This generically hybrid quality results partly from the semi-independent nature of the production: Santana pictures was Bogart’s company (named after his yacht). Biographical echoes include the apartment set modelled on the complex where Ray lived when he first moved to Los Angeles. He was married to Grahame, but they separated during screening, and Ray started sleeping in a dressing room on set, telling everyone that he needed to focus on the work of directing. The story of a screenwriter who doesn’t follow the plot of the novel he is tasked with adapting is germane to the auteurist legend of Ray as a Hollywood outsider refusing to compromise his art. As for Bogart, he had a reputation for violence: he and his third wife, Mayo Methot, were known as ‘the battling Bogarts’. A month before production began Bogart was charged with an act of public violence at the El Morocco Club in New York, not unlike Dix’s outbursts at Paul’s club. The violence and toxic masculinity of Dix Steele is hard to watch, behaviour that may be explained—but not excused—as what we now call PTSD, resulting from Steele’s WWII service. The war is mentioned at least six times, as when Brub alludes to William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a movie about the struggles returning veterans face trying to adjust to post-war society. Twice someone mentions that Dix was a more successful screenwriter before the war than after.

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Thursday 13 February: Sunset Boulevard (1950), dir. Billy Wilder

Introduced by Madeleine Le Despencer

Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950) is not a typical film noir. There is no mystery about the murder, for example, so there is no need for the wise-cracking detective figure found in most noirs, but the film includes several noir elements, such as the flashback voiceover and the femme fatale. These expected noir elements, however, are themselves atypical: the flashback action is not normally voiced by a dead man, and the femme fatale is usually not quite so long in the tooth as Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). In addition to noir, Sunset Blvd., like In a Lonely Place, combines noir with the backstudio film and the woman’s picture. In backstudio films like George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? (1932) and William A. Wellman’s A Star is Born (1937), an older man helps a younger woman get into pictures, but as her star rises his declines, with the older show-biz mentor abusing alcohol in a self-destructive spiral into depression. Sunset Blvd. parodies this pattern in reverse, with the older, more experienced woman ‘helping’ the younger man. The woman’s picture is suggested when Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), aspiring screenwriter, tells Joe Gillis (William Holden) she wants to rework a scene involving a schoolteacher in ‘Dark Windows’, one of his old story ideas. Later, in a scene set at Schwab’s Drugstore, Betty tells Joe she’s developed the scene into ‘something for Barbara Stanwick’. Stanwick was nominated for an Academy Award for the title role in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), perhaps the most renowned woman’s picture of them all. Thinking of Sunset Blvd. as a woman’s picture is not quite the exercise in irony it first seems; after all, Desmond’s ambitions appear delusional mainly because the male-dominated movie industry cannot conceive of an older woman as a romantic lead. The depravity of the scenario, set in 1950, involving the kept man and the deranged, forgotten star of the 1920s, is matched by the ‘original’ depravity of the 1890s, evoked by way of the vehicle for Desmond’s would-be return to the silver screen: the story of Salome. Desmond gives the name of the biblical temptress its British pronunciation, in keeping with the English translation of Oscar Wilde’s play, the evident basis for the script Desmond herself has written. The misplaced ardour on the part of Salome that leads to the death of John the Baptist has a common base in delusion with the inappropriate amours of Sunset Blvd. Moreover, Desmond is shown dancing the tango alone before she partners with Gillis at her bizarre New Year’s Eve party to which no one else is invited. This Salome-like moment combines with the rehearsal and shooting of a scene from DeMille’s Samson and Delilah—Delilah being another biblical femme fatale—to make Desmond herself a member of that spider-woman sorority. In one of many moments of cinematic self-referentiality, DeMille, playing himself, calls Desmond ‘young fellow’, the form of address he used for Swanson when he directed her in Male and Female (1919) and other silents.

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Thursday 6 March: Touch of Evil (1958), dir. Orsen Welles

Introduced by Imogen Sara Smith

In a seminal essay on film noir from 1972, the writer/director Paul Schrader declared Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) ‘film noir’s epitaph’. Part of his meaning is that by 1958 noir, already highly stylized to begin with, had attained a level of stylistic saturation with Welles, his astonishing virtuosity with the camera reaching a point of mannerist self-indulgence. Maybe so, but it is also true that Welles was very much aware that he was exploding noir conventions. Self-indulgence, in other words, is matched by self-consciousness, a winking recognition of noir’s formulas that is registered not only visually but also in the dialogue, as when Susie Vargas (Janet Leigh) says to the film’s resident crime boss (Akim Tamiroff): ‘You know what’s wrong with you, Mr Grandi? You’ve been seeing too many gangster movies.’ Welles’ three-and-a-half minute continuous opening shot establishes not only the location (the raunchy Mexican border town of Los Robles) but also introduces two major characters, Mexican detective Ramon Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston—in brownface) and his new bride, Susie—not to mention getting the plot started: the first frame shows someone setting a time bomb, then placing it in the trunk of a 1956 Chrysler New Yorker convertible coup. Welles does not cut until the explosion (don’t worry: he blew up a 1949 Oldsmobile instead of the iconic Chrysler), just after the newlyweds Vargas and Susie kiss. Later, Vargas tells Susie, ‘This isn’t the real Mexico.’ No kidding. Filmed in Venice Beach, California, ‘Los Robles’ is more phantasmagoria than Mexico. The opening shot is extremely fluid, achieved by mounting a crane on a vehicle of some kind, but after the explosion the ride gets bumpy, to say the least, as Welles takes us through the investigation conducted by the corrupt American police captain, Hank Quinlan, played by a sweaty, bulbous Welles, who looks like he really does need to ‘lay off the candy bars’, as Tana (Marlene Dietrich), the ‘gypsy’ madam of the local brothel, tells him (Dietrich’s famous cheekbones could not be more prominent if the movie were filmed in 3-D). As Quinlan investigates the double murder of the sugar daddy and local stripper incinerated in the explosion, he follows his usual corrupt methods (planting evidence and the like). Vargas begins to investigate the investigator, and Quinlan in turn makes things hard for Susie, who goes to a motel to be ‘safe’ (Leigh evidently learned nothing about sketchy hotels from her experience in this film, as her role in Psycho (1960) shows). Clearly, both Vargas and Susie are out of their element, a quality captured by one perceptive critic who says that their story ‘is about a nice Hollywood couple who stumble into a film by Orson Welles’. Is this really ‘film noir’s epitaph’ or the first neo-noir (albeit in black-and-white)? The decadent atmosphere of social corruption certainly looks forward to such standout neo-noirs as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), and Curtis Hanson’s L.A Confidential (1996).

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Thursday 13 March: Singapore Sling (1990), dir. Nikos Nikolaidis

Introduced by Kostas Boyiopoulos

Nikos Nikolaidis’ Singapore Sling (1990) is subtitled Ο Άνθρωπος που Αγάπησε ένα Πτώμα, transliterated ‘O Ánthropos pou Agápise éna Ptóma’ and translated ‘The Man Who Loved a Corpse’, an echo of what Waldo Lydecker says to Detective Mark McPherson in Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir, Laura. The corpse lover in this case is the detective ‘named’ Singapore Sling (Panos Thanassoulis), whose search for his lost Laura leads him to a secluded villa where he hopes to find the woman. What he finds instead are not one but two femme fatales, one of whom is a dead ringer for the Laura the detective seeks. He finds them in the garden outside the villa digging a grave in a torrential rainstorm and burying their chauffeur, whom they have murdered by knifing him in the gut (at one point they stuff the man’s entrails back inside his abdomen) before dumping him—somehow still alive—into the grave. The detective passes out from a bullet wound (we don’t know who shot him). When he awakens, he makes his way to the front door of the villa, where he is promptly clubbed unconscious with the butt of a Luger pistol. The women go through his pockets and find a notebook describing his quest for Laura, as well as the recipe for the gin-based cocktail Singapore Sling, so that’s how he acquires the moniker. Since the drink was originally known as a Gin Sling, the name might also allude to another film noir, Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941), by way of the ‘Dragon Lady’ character called Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson). In any case, the two women tie the detective to a bed so they can nurse him back to health by abusing him sexually in some quite creative ways, sadism being their stock in trade. These women call each other Mother (Michele Valley) and Daughter (Meredyth Herold), the names evidently being part of their sexual role-playing since there is no family resemblance and they appear to be about the same age. One of their sex games reenacts the evening when, three years earlier, Laura (Herold in a double role) came to the villa to apply for the job of secretary. This game involves Daughter kneeling for ‘confession’ and being forced to fellate Mother’s strap-on dildo, followed by some doggy-style dildo intercourse. A flashback shows Mother murdering the real Laura by eviscerating the woman; her still-beating heart and other organs wind up on a kitchen table ‘decorated’ with her earrings and pearl necklace. The plot of the film is easy to follow, helped along by Mother and Daughter’s fourth-wall-breaking commentary (in English, though Mother sometimes doubles hers in French), as well as by the detective’s voice-over narration in Greek (he never speaks outright). While Laura is the primary filmic reference, certain details of Mother’s costuming evoke Sunset Blvd., turning her into a Norma Desmond figure, but these are not the only two. Look for allusions to Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’artifice (1953), Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975).

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Film Club Location

Goldsmiths is located in New Cross, South East London.

It is a short walk from both New Cross Gate and New Cross stations (Zone 2) on the main rail network and London overground; about a 7 minute journey from London Bridge and 30 minutes from London Victoria. It is on bus routes 21, 36, 53, 136, 171, 172, 177, 225, 321, 343, 436, 453.

The screening will be in the cinema in the Richard Hoggart Building. A map can be found here. The cinema is fully accessible and on the ground floor.

For exact directions to Goldsmiths please see the How to Find Us page on the Goldsmiths website.

Film Club Archive - Past Screenings

For more information about these or any of our screenings, please email drc@gold.ac.uk.