A case study of two Barbara Stanwyck films released in 1950, The File on Thelma Jordan and No Man of Her Own illustrate the ease with which film noir and the woman's picture could be mated in vehicles built for a major female star. These two films narratively and stylistically register the generic instability and porousness of film noir. The promotion of these films in newspaper ads, moreover, built upon and exploited their generic ambiguity. Centering the numerous newspaper ads was Stanwyck's star text through her already strong identification with both woman's pictures and film noir. As a case study, then, the two films show the basis of noir as a melodramatic mode.
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Steven Cohan (2024) studied this question.
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