Detective Agency? Scoring the Amateur Female Investigator in 1940S Hollywood

12. Straight to Baby: Scoring Female Jazz Agency and New Masculinity in Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn

“…In short, women' roles in these films were often secondary, acting as foils to prominent men. 10 As Kathryn Kalinak reveals, dominant and hierarchical enactments of gender are well examined by film scholars, yet few have understood how the sound world of classic film originally established the gendered sonic expectations of noir narratives. Following Claudia Gorbman's famous treatise on narrative music, Kalinak argues that such gendered principles were first established in the 1930s and continue to ground our perception of film music codes.…”

“…Through her investigation of various B-level noir and crime films from the 1940s, Catherine Haworth posits that women sometimes inhabited more complex roles which afforded agency and mobility across classic Hollywood archetypes. 15 Such mobility was achieved and supported musically through the use of both existing library music (cues) and newly composed musical sequences, albeit often only temporarily in the initial stages of a film's narrative. Haworth reveals that, ultimately, musical conventions would also be used to contain such mobility by fetishisticly or reductively highlighting gendered or cultural difference.…”

“…Haworth reveals that, ultimately, musical conventions would also be used to contain such mobility by fetishisticly or reductively highlighting gendered or cultural difference. 16 The agency of female detectives in 1940s noir/crime genres is contained as they acquiesce their working status to take up the romantic or domestic needs of male protagonists who eventually reinhabit their dominant roles as detectives. Musically this is rendered by occasionally allowing women agency in the sleuthing scenes while the scoring takes on more chromatic and tensioncreating moods and, then again, reasserting their secondary romantic interest role with more classical leitmotif themes where the female amateur detective is scored with romantic upper-register strings or other feminine-identified orchestrations.…”