95
Pink is the New Black: 50s Color Noir, the “Fatal Man,” and the
“Femme” Detective in A Kiss Bef&re Dying
When the writer pulls it off, certain scenes explode into
technicolor images in the mind and linger long after the book has been
finished and returned to the shelf (Penzler ix). In “Noir in Color?” (the
question mark is illustrative), Alex Ballinger and Danny Graydon write
that “dramatic contrasts of light and shade are such a defining feature of
film noir, especially of those films made in the 1940s and 1950s, that the
idea of noir filmed in color. . . sounds like an oxymoron” (131).
The grand exception in the classic period has always been Leave
Her to Heaven (1945). About John Stahl’s picture and its desert
landscape the “color of dried blood,” Raymond Borde and Etienne
Chaumeton in A Panorama o f American Film Noir (1955) write that
“this was the first time Technicolor [had] been used in a crime film”
(47). If the exceptional status of color noir tends to hold true for the
1940s (but see, in addition to Leave Her to Heaven, Rope (1948) and
Desert Fury (1947)), this becomes rather less so in the 1950s, as the
examples of Black Widow (1954), Slightly Scarlet (1956), A Kiss Before
Dying{\956), and Vertigo (1958) demonstrate.^’
A Kiss Before Dying is especially interesting in the context of
classic noir because it graphically illustrates the way in which 50s noirs
utilize color in conjunction with lighting, mise-en-scene, and, in
particular, costuming to dramatize the genre’s formal and thematic
components. Rather, more specifically, A Kiss Before Dying is able to
translate prototypical noir character-types such as the “good bad girl,”
the homme fatal (“fatal man”), and the female or “femme” detective into
the medium of color via, among other things, hue, value (light versus
dark), and temperature (cool versus warm).
A Kiss Before Dying, like Slightly Scarlet, features two sisters,
but unlike the Lyons sisters in the latter film, one of whom is “good” and
one is “bad,” the Kingship sisters, Dorothy (Joanne Woodward) and
Ellen (Virginia Leith), are both “good girls [...] daughters and sole heirs
of a copper magnate” (Christopher 225). While the femme fatale is a
staple of classic noir, the absence of a “bad girl” in A Kiss Before
Dyings, more than made up for by the presence of the lethally charming
Bud Corliss (Robert Wagner), who romances “Dorrie,” then, after giving
her the big kiss off (in a startling sequence that foreshadows Vertigo),
ensnares Ellen.
In American Film Noir (1981), Robert Ottoson asserts that A
Kiss Before Dymgemploys a “familiar noir device — the unscrupulous