WHEN STRANGERS MARRY (1944) (aka BETRAYED) By 1944, with the war in Europe raging away, the mania for quickie marriages at home reached alarming levels. Such whirlwind couplings were explored in many Hollywood films at the time. In Vincente Minelli’s 1945 romance, The Clock, Robert Walker and Judy Garland meet, fall in love, and wed over a two-day pass; while in Cromwell and Selznick’s 1944 Since You Went Away the effects of such a marriage resonate throughout the lives of a Midwestern family; and most famously in William Wyler’s masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives Dana Andrews and goodtime-girl Virginia Mayo discover what life is like for such a couple after the war has ended.
With prestige studio productions such as these dominating the screen, it seems inevitable then that a B-crime picture would come along and explore what can happen when two people who barely know each other tie the knot. The result is When Strangers Marry, an exciting little thriller that delivers as much suspense as one could ask for in an hour. Welcome to StellingFilms.nl. Film Noir. Images - Film Noir. Unlike other forms of cinema, the film noir has no paraphernalia that it can truly call its own. Unlike the western, with cattle drives, lonely towns on the prairie, homesteading farmers, Winchester rifles, and Colt 45s, the film noir borrows its paraphernalia from other forms, usually from the crime and detective genres, but often overlapping into thrillers, horror, and even science fiction (as in the great "what's it" box from Kiss Me Deadly).
The visual style echoes German expressionism, painting shafts of light that temporarily illuminate small chunks of an ominous and overbearing universe that limits a person's chances to slim and none. For as Paul Schrader said in his influential "Notes on Film Noir" essay, "No character can speak authoritatively from a space which is continually being cut into ribbons of light. " Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. Heroes in the film noir world would forever struggle to survive. Sterling Hayden and his gang in The Killing.
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