Rather than the revelation of socio-economic patterns of political and financial power and corruption which mark the gangster/thriller, film noir probes the secrets of female sexuality and male desire within patterns of submission and dom- inance. Thus the enquiries of the police or private detective come eventually to concentrate on the state of the hero’s, and more frequently, the heroine’s, heart.

These inflections set up a conflict in the treatment of women in film noir. On the one hand their image is produced in the course of male investigation and moral judgment. On the other the suppression of the bourgeois family and centrality of women in the male world of action produces female representations out- side family definition and dependency. This means that questions of economic survival have to be broached. Two options are available to women — work or living off a man. In film noir both options emphasise the sexual objectification of women, for its criminal ambience situates working women in bars and nightclubs rather than in professions or factories. But sexuality and money are brought into explicit juxtaposition — a contradiction for bourgeois morality in that female sexuality is supposed to be sanctified by love given freely, which is hidden within marriage and the family. Moreover, the heroine often shares the hard-boiled cynicism of the hero, which further undermines conventional sexual ideology. But this does not imply an unambiguously progressive approach in the noir treatment of women, for female sexuality is also juxtaposed within the investigative structure to the law and the voice of male judgment, and in many ways it is the under- side of the bourgeois family that is brought to the surface for investigation.