virtually perfect still, used on the film's publicity posters-is its collection of fascinating

cinematic objects.10 The curl of the bandit's eyebrow, his hat tilted at an angle, the

handkerchief around his neck, all offer disruptive rather than narrative pleasure. They

gesture toward the other half of the equation of Classic Hollywood cinema. Paraphrasing

Siegfried Kracauer's argument cited in the epigraph, I would suggest that narrative

cinema does not travel on highways through the void. It winds its way through the thicket

of things. What we need, then, is another way of thinking about these things-a way of

mobilizing the kind of spectatorship that Epstein privileged, and that the rail traveler

perfected, in order to address the stuff that movies are made of.

 Objects, even ordinary ones, were central to studio filmmaking. As Will Hays

asserted in a radio speech, "The motion picture carries to every American at home, and to

millions of potential purchasers abroad, the visual, vivid perception of American

manufactured products" (qtd. in Eckert 5). Even when films were not explicitly

promoting specific items through tie-ups with corporations-as seen in the popular

fashion films of the 1930s11-they were implicitly showcasing items for visual

consumption. I am referring not only to the unambiguously memorable objects, like

Dorothy's ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz (1939), but also to things like Walter Neff s

dictaphone in Double Indemnity (1944) or the tailor's cutting shears in Ministry ofFear

(1944). Film noir lends itself particularly well to such a visual display; its expressionist

mise-en-scene and chiaroscuro lighting yield mysterious stills that, like Edward Hopper

paintings, highlight everyday objects capable of providing visual pleasure. In a recent

essay on Barbara Stanwyck's anklet, which deals with the fatal pleasure of a well-dressed

femme fatale, Paula Rabinowitz makes the following case for objects: