‘Stars & Screen’ Cinema & Media History Virtual Symposium | May 16, 2026

Next Saturday! You can find the whole program on line here and you can attend by RSVPing on the page. Here’s my subject (though I’ve only got 15 minutes so it may be a little bare bones):

Haunted: Where Gothic Bleeds into Noir

Can the Gothic victim so easily become the noir villain? The 1947 Joan Fontaine vehicle Ivy, based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1927 novel The Story of Ivy, offers the portrait of a femme fatale, or as the contemporary New York Times review put it, ‘a monstrous female with a guile that is nothing short of frightening’ (26 Jun 1947). A similar case can be built using the 1946 film Bedelia adapted from Vera Caspary’s 1945 novel of the same name, about another murderous woman starring Margaret Lockwood. With the film’s setting changed from the early teens to more contemporary times, it nonetheless retains much of a gothic ambience. In particular, moving the action from Connecticut to Monte Carlo and Yorkshire sets off echoes of Rebecca and the Brontës. Ivy’s action moves from the novel’s Roaring Twenties to the Edwardian period suggesting a closer generic connection to more conventional gothic ‘melodrama’ but as Ian Brookes’ argues, the overlap between gothic and noir can be considerable. His examples include films like My Name is Julia Ross (1945) and The Spiral Staircase (1946) as well as Ivy. The existential dread, money troubles, and lust both for material goods and sexual conquests offer a noir ambience at odds with the lacy decolletage and parasols. Despite the Edwardian frills and the excitement over the novelty of air travel, much of the film explores the darkened urban spaces that easily slip from stifling gothic repression within the run-down and aged houses to the darkened backstreets of noir. While the opening scene where Ivy seeks a reading from Una O’Connor’s fortune teller seems immediately representative of gothic tropes, the crime aspects of the story and the emotional manipulation of men by the title character are equally at home under the generous umbrella of noir.

Yes, I was musing about this on an episode of Surreal Noir. I am busy chopping things down to fit the time available and considering sacrificing Bedelia all together, which would be a pity for sure. Such a fun little film — and novel! Both novels are well worth reading, which I have talked about or written about elsewhere (somewhere?). Maybe it was at a conference. I am considering making my conference presentations all videos as I do not give two hoots about publishing these days.