Introduction

When Warner Brothers prepared reviews and publicity pieces for their thriller The Conspirators (1944) for exhibitors to slip into local newspapers, they stressed the centrality of the city where the film's action took place. As a result, papers across the US published variations of the following paragraph: ‘The Portuguese capital of Lisbon, transformed into a cauldron of romance and intrigue by a world at war, where spies and counter-spies, Nazis and anti-Nazis, soldiers of fortune and cringing refugees from the abattoir that was occupied Europe, rub elbows, is the stage for this absorbing mystery-romance.’ With these lines, the studio inscribed the film in the emerging wave of US-produced romantic thrillers revolving around a sharply defined setting (usually a city, sometimes a larger region) placed at the crossroads of world affairs. Unlike The Conspirators, their titles often conveyed the setting-centric motif: Casablanca (1942), Tangier (1946), Calcutta (1947), Singapore (1947), Hong Kong (1952), Macao (1952), Lisbon (1956), Istanbul (1957). While many films summon – and expand on– their setting's reputation, between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s there was a distinct trend of what we shall call Iconic City thrillers, characterized by the way they bombarded audiences with reminders of each city's transcendental significance through tropes related to film noir, such as chiaroscuro visuals, intricate plots, hardboiled dialogue, and existential malaise.