"when a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it"-it stays

focused on the bedside composition, as if transfixed by a few charmed objects. Bogart's

voice is heard off-screen: "Hello. Yeah, speaking. Miles Archer dead? Where?

... Bush and Stockton? ... Uh. Fifteen Minutes. Thanks." After he hangs up, the

camera pans right gradually to accommodate the star's profile in the frame; he replaces

the telephone and turns on a lamp, illuminating the entire shot. Now the objects resume

their diegetic function: the alarm clock establishes the time of night, 2:05 am; Duke's

Celebrated Criminal Cases ofAmerica verifies Spade's status as a private eye; the sack

of Bull Durham authenticates his hardboiled character. Action regains precedence over

ambience, and the forward momentum will only cease when his partner's murder has

been avenged.1

 And yet, for a few seconds, the bedside arrangement in John Huston's The Maltese

Falcon (1941) interrupts the onward advance of the plot. The moment metonymically

represents the distinctive style of 1940s Hollywood-chiefly characterized by what

Manny Farber has called "puzzling, faintly marred kaleidoscopes of a street, face, or

gesture" (Negative Space 61). There is no mistaking this portentous telephonic moment

of noir for any scene from the luxurious "white telephone" films that were typical of the

previous decade.2 Like the extreme close-up of a visually enormous coffee cup, which

succinctly captures the feeling of paranoiac entrapment in Edgar G. Ulmer' s Detour

(1945), this virtual still conjures an intriguing world from the waft of mystery, the whiff

of noir.

 But the pull of the moment when the telephone rings is not only contextual. There

is a certain immediacy in its appeal. Even though the narrative is ongoing, our attention is