Film

image: The Feminist Press

Hughes's pulp heroine: no femme fatale

Related Content

• To the Barricades, Variously
  December 7, 2011
• Conor Tomás Reed, CUNY Teacher and Ph D Student, On Being Arrested for Protesting Tuition Hikes
  November 28, 2011
• CUNY Students and Unions Protest as Board of Trustees Passes Tuition Hike
  November 28, 2011
• CUNY Students to Protest Today; Barricades Already Set Up, Classes Cancelled
  November 28, 2011
• Students Say "Fuck Ass-Kissing" and Other Highlights From The OWS Student Walkout
  November 18, 2011

More About

• Nicholas Ray
• Dorothy Hughes
• Humphrey Bogart
• Women's Issues
• Sexism

In the Cutisn't the first attempt to take back the night. Rescued from obscurity by CUNY's Feminist Press, Dorothy B. Hughes's 1947 pulp thriller In a Lonely Place($14.95, paper)—source for Nicholas Ray's 1950 movie—is a fascinating exercise in duplicitous narration that subverts noir misogyny by unfolding inside the mind of a serial sex-killer. Ray's movie (less noirthan gris) upgrades the antihero from murderous con artist to Humphrey Bogart's tormented screenwriter, getting props for evoking Hollywood's blacklist paranoia. Hughes's more sinister look at post-war America reveals the movie as the recuperation of her recuperation. Don't bother looking for the celebrated line Gloria Grahame reads back to Bogie: "I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me." In the novel, the femme fatale is the hero.