Coffee and Noir: ON DANGEROUS GROUND
every instance of coffee in noir: 049
You can learn a lot about a character by how they take their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?
I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.
Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) lives a simple life by choice, and his ‘cooking’ setup bears that out.
It’s functional and practical . . . if you call having one pot, one plate, one set of silverware, then a kettle AND a large tin coffeemaker practical.
He knows what’s important to him, I guess!
While I’m always here for Ida Lupino, and don’t even mind a noir which says people can change for the better — especially when removed from the crushing capitalist and punitive systems which benefit from corrupting everything good — this melodrama didn’t work for me a bit.
Suppose I should count my blessings they didn’t pile on “woman makes coffee better than a man ever can” as insult to my injury.