TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES' CRUEL BEAUTY

    For Cruel Beauty, TCM's special on women in film noir, we recreated the climatic sequence of Orson Welles' classic noir masterpiece The Lady from Shanghai. The short scene included over 500 square feet of mirrors and was filmed after a week of testing how they break using live rounds of ammunition and air cannons to achieve the desired effect.
    A part of the great American tradition of using low culture to explore profound themes, noir began in the form of B movies and pulp thrillers. Imploring the narrative conventions of the crime thriller, noir presented the dark side of the American soul. With themes like the glamour of hopelessness, the romance of clinging to the past, and the seductiveness of the futile, noir featured honorable hoodlums, crooked cops, mean streets, and of course the femme fatale, which is what the movies of Cruel Beauty are all about.