Femme Fatales and Hard Boiled Patsies:
Film Noir and Beyond
Taught by Ruth Perlmutter, Ph.D.
Dr. Perlmutter has taught numerous film courses
at Penn and Temple.

Do you think the good guy always wins in Classical Hollywood Cinema? Do you think these movies always have a good guy?

Think again.

This course introduces students to film noir, a phrase credited to critic Nino Frank who used it to describe a cycle of pictures that emerged from the gangster and crime genres in the 1940s. A tricky category, noirs can be detective films, thrillers—even post-modern anti-narratives—and are often more concerned with "How" or "Why" rather than "Who-dun-it."

More style than genre, noir through the decades has had a sustained fascination with doom, male anxiety and transgression, the threats of which the spell-casting femme fatale embodies. Although these films are typified by stark lighting, bleak urban settings and corrupt, broken characters, their influence extends far beyond these parameters and has impacted films as diverse as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Barton Fink and Mulholland Drive.

Archive of Past Courses (Click here)