the corpse

"You see, the body of a young man was found floating in the pool of her mansion, with two shots in his back and one in his stomach.  Nobody important, really -- just a movie writer with a couple of B-pictures to his credit.  Poor dope.   He always wanted a pool.  Well, in the end, he got himself a pool.  Only the price turned out to be a little high..."
-- screenwriter and narrator Joe Gillis (William Holden), setting the scene for Billy Wilder's gothic Hollywood noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950)

In film noir, murder is just about unavoidable.  Sooner or later, somebody ends up slumbering the Big Sleep -- and, more often than not, the evidence points to an innocent party.  (The word "innocent," however is a relative term in noir, where it's not unusual that everyone in the picture, including the "hero," is morally tainted in some way.)  But corpses are full of surprises. Sometimes, they offer eloquently silent "testimony" from beyond the grave that can break the case wide open (like the anonymous bum who drowns during a drought in Chinatown.)  And in other cases, the corpse itself may be an imposter (as in Laura). There's a spine-chilling moment in Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997) in which a dying man ingeniously plants the clue that will solve his own murder by the last words he utters to his killer. Who says dead men (and women) tell no tales?

	A mob casualty does the dead man's float in Samuel Fuller's Underworld, U.S.A. (1961).  Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) [below] also features a corpse floating in a swimming pool -- and in that case, the stiff has a lot to say about how he got there...
Poor Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is having one of those lifetimes.  Hitchhiking to Hollywood, he accepts a ride from a man who mysteriously dies, leaving Al in quite a predicament.  That's merely the first of many bizarre turns Al's life takes in Edgar G. Ulmer's classic B-picture, Detour (1945).  The movie's final words sum up the fatalism of noir perfectly:   "Fate or some mysterious force can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all."
Click here for a better look at that corpse...	A few drinks, a chance meeting, an impulsive decision -- and suddenly your life can be ruined. Prof. Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) and Alice Reed (Joan Bennett) prepare to dispose of the corpse of the man they've killed in self-defense in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944).   As Hitchock discovered in Psycho (1960), there's nothing like cleaning up a murder scene to get an audience to identify with your characters.  Whether the killer is innocent or not, we instinctively want everything nice and tidy.
George Stroud (Ray Milland) discovers the body that will frame him for  murder, in John Farrow's The Big Clock (1948).
	Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) is a tough cop who accidentally kills a man while interrogating him and decides to make it look like a mob   hit, in Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950).  Notice the shadow of the bridge bearing down on him as he dumps the body.  But disposing of the corpse is never the end of the story.  In this case, an innocent taxi driver is implicated in the murder...
The corpse in the Dark Room (who is he?   who killed him?) is that of wealthy Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott) in Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), for which Joan Crawford won an Oscar as the title character.

back into the dark room