So Dark The Night Analysis

Respected for his artistic efforts, Lewis had that special quality the French called auteur when making a picture truly in his vision. Lewis was a chameleon with each film he directed and still managed to input his style while maintaining the mood of the characters in the story and designing the scenery to fit the tempo of the film, as Hirsch recognizes, “Lewis shifts his own style to accommodate the style of his characters and their setting. The detective in So Dark the Night, on the surface, is sedate and implacable, a man of absolutely sober deportment; and the film’s own measured manner echoes the character’s. The fugitive couple in Gun Crazy have a very different rhythm. The woman, who goads the man into a life of crime, is wildly impulsive, forever on the run; to capture her essential spirit. Lewis adopts a more expansive style than the one he used fatherlier film. He gives Gun Crazy a nervous, jagged movement” (Hirsch 134). …show more content…
However, if you look at the original writing credits for the film, you’ll discover it says “MacKinlay Kantor and Millard Kaufman” as such at that time during the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s many professionals screenwriters, actors, directors, and musicians were barred from working in the entertainment industry if they were suspected of having any affiliation with the Communist Party. The blacklist was purely political and part of the Red Scare of the Cold War era that swept the nation at that time, but ultimately destroying many careers in Hollywood in the process. As Grant clarifies in his book, Trumbo managed to keep working during this harsh period, “Millard Kaufman was fronting as scripter for Dalton Trumbo, who has been blacklisted during Hollywood’s McCarthyite witch hunt” (Grant