Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950).
Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950.)
Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat (1953).
Gloria Grahame as Violet Bick and Donna Reed as Mary Hatch Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
"The iconography of small-town comedy is exchanged, unmistakably, for that of film noir.... [T]he good-time gal/wife-mother opposition, translated in to noir terms, becomes an opposition of prostitute and repressed spinster librarian."
—Robin Wood on It's a Wonderful Life in "Ideology, Genre, Auteur"
It wasn't the way I looked at a man, it was the thought behind it.
—Gloria Grahame, film noir's perennial femme fatale. This dame's odd alchemy of pouty cuteness and lurid, masochistic desire made her truly unsettling—like Shirley Temple gone very, very wrong.