Jazz and Cocktails: Reassessing the White and Black Mix in Film Noir

In many noirs, the white protagonists work in nightclubs, as singers, dancers or musicians - Veronica Lake's character in This Gun for Hire (Tuttle, 1942), June Vincent and Dan Duryea's characters in Black Angel (Neill, 1946), Ida Lupino's character in Road House (Negulesco, 1948) - in the segregated (if not exactly swing) tradition. In the neo-noir Collateral, the jazz sequence serves primarily to confirm white male power over black militancy. Author's Note This paper was originally presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in London in 2005.