num_pages: 176
description: Imagine a museum in which the portrait of Carlotta Valdes, an important prop in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo , hangs on a wall next to the painted portrait of the title character of Otto Preminger’s Laura , opposite the portraits of the desired or murdered women in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street , George Cukor’s Gaslight and Nicholas Ray’s Born to Be Bad . In an adjacent gallery, the visitor of this imaginary museum can contemplate the portraits of patriarchs that feature in films such as House of Strangers , Suspicion , Gilda and Strangers on a Train . This is precisely the concept of this book. The Dark Galleries looks at American (and some British) films of the 1940s and 1950s, in which a painted portrait plays an important part in the plot. Presented as a guide to an imaginary museum, this book includes more than 80 entries on the artistic and cinematic aspects of these portraits.
language: English
title: The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir Gothic Melodramas and Ghost Stories of the 1940s and 1950s
publisher: ARAMER