Keechie: Femme Formidable :: Film Movie Essays

Keechie Femme FormidableINSTRUCTORS COMMENT This is an extraordinarily concluded essay beautifully written, critically perceptive, and nicely related to the critical plow on Altman and subscribe noir. Saving the quotation from Anderson for the very end is a nice touch because it brings the reader back to the frame of reference the appendage of adaptation. The little note about first shots of Cora in two versions of The postman Always Rings Twice makes an extremely clear point of analogy with which to think about Altmans very different agenda. A fine, fine get together of work, of which you should be very proud. In an article entitled Night and day, Robert Philip Kolker distinguishes a transformation of the gangster strike from the genres conventional film noir elements. He places Robert Altmans Thieves Like Us, an adaptation of Edward Andersons 1937 crime novel, amongst this subgenre on account of the films antigeneric mise-en-scene. While Altmans red ink from the classic fi lm noir form has often been analyzed by film critics, the noir heroine--who is generally central to the plot--has received little (if any) attention. Further, even though devotion to the original text pervades adaptation discourse as a study criterion for judging the cinematic counterpart, critics have often overlooked Altmans just about noteworthy change to Andersons grim story Keechie survives in the end. In fact, the film tends to be compared more with Nichols Rays preceding film version than with the novel. as yet, in his utilisation of film noir genre conventions, Altman not only constructs a lighter, more sluttish world, he creates a corresponding heroine who likewise transforms the characteristics of the noir woman.1Women in Film Noir, redact by E. Ann Kaplan, provides the framework from which an examination of Keechies character can be drawn. passim the volume several distinctions are made between the two categories of women in film noir. While the femme fatale is ch aracterized as a combination of sexuality and belligerency which inevitably makes her an obstacle to the male quest, the appropriate archetype--woman as redeemer--is depicted as a means of integration for the hero into both his environment and himself. However much control either type of woman may video display throughout the course of the film, by the end of it is relinquished. They are either restored to their electropositive positions in patriarchy2 or destroyed. Keechie both manifests and opposes selective qualities attributed to the femme fatale and the nurturing woman (as she is referred to in the Kaplan text).