The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir Gothic Melodramas and Ghost Stories of the 1940s and 1950s

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.