Gilda Tagged Articles at Cinematical

This is one of those posts that will see me called out as wrong, or state something painfully obvious, but you can't blame a girl for trying.

I've mentioned before that I've been watching a lot of film noir. Naturally, those kinds of Netflix searches lead one to watching a lot of fedora-filled films, and revisiting anything of Alfred Hitchcock's that happens to be online. Watching everything from Gilda to The Man Who Knew Too Much in a very short period of time has led me to jump to a silly conclusion --film locations used to be a lot more exotic. The films of the 1930s, '40s, 50s, and even 60s are set in all kinds of fabulous locations: Brazil, Buenos Aires, Shang-Hai, Istanbul, Cannes, Casablanca. Characters travel languidly and carelessly to all four corners of the Earth without thinking too much of it, which is pretty remarkable in a time when few people left their hometown, let alone their country.

Most of these "locations" are never seen, of course. (A huge exception is always Hitchcock, who plunks everyone right there on the streets of Istanbul or Rio de Janeiro) I don't think there's anything remotely Argentinian about Gilda (the South American casino looks like it reused the walls of Tara), but it oozes exoticism all the same. You never see the Shang-Hai of The Lady From Shang-Hai, but the fact that the blonde beauty speaks fluent Chinese just adds that extra bit of mystery. Plus that film sees them sailing all over the place via the Panama Canal, as if that's something everyone with a yacht does every summer. But even if the exotic locales are nothing more than a name drop or a bunch of stock footage, it makes the film far more sensual than if it's simply set in San Fransisco or Miami.

I constantly worry that I'm becoming desensitized to violence and horror thanks to watching so many damn movies, and having a penchant for those that are riddled with explosions and coarse language. (If Scott Weinberg has his way, I will have a healthy appreciation for the slasher flick as well. Speaking of which, have you read Horror Virgin yet?) As a kid, I was always sternly brought up to know that movies were fiction, and that violence was very real, and to know that guns, knives, grenades, etc. were no cheering or laughing matter unless Mel Gibson was using or running away from them.

Like much of the civilized world, I've been following the protests in Iran, and while I empathized with what was going on, I felt curiously detached from seeing images of real violence. I read comments from people who said they were shaking and vomiting from seeing people die on camera, and I wondered if I was a terrible person because I wasn't. Is it because I watch so much of it onscreen? Or am I saturated by it thanks to the real world -- I watched Columbine happen on television while living a few blocks away from it, to say nothing of the trauma of 9/11, and documentaries about Darfur and the Holocaust.