![]() ![]() ![]() Hard-boiled detectives’ secretaries provided an important domesticating influence in post–World War II radio dramas, helping to downplay the hard-boiled detective’s transgressively violent, working-class origins and frame him as a universal father figure for everyday citizens. My narrative pursues a series of clues taken from diverse sources (films, literature, biographies, historiography) and shares classic Hollywood cinema’s most distinctive trait: detective-like investigation. ![]() Setting out from a scene in The Maltese Falcon, I bring together the two analytic threads of this argument: on one hand, the gender marker that situates Bogart’s persona somewhere between an apparent indifference and sudden vulnerability on the other, the visual culture – unthinkable separate from a situated social experience – as a symbolic dimension that conditions the geometry of gazes (audience, camera, cast). ![]() I argue that the notion of the Hollywood persona enables a mediation between the actor’s image and his or her social trajectory: it forms a kind of symbolic power capable of establishing the actor within the cinema production system. This article describes the first version of the screen persona developed by the American actor Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957), seen in the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. ![]()
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