Matthew Sorrento

EDWARD G. ROBINSON IN PUBLIC DOMAIN

Somewhere the man
would trap one like Welles' Franz Kindler,
now hidden, having killed again.

Tracing the Nazi terrors
on a movie screen,
he walks into the death projection:
his own dream fabric
where waking would take him.

His prey now dead,
the townsfolk regard him
as another Stranger.


Matthew reads "Edward G. Robinson in Public Domain":



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Matthew confesses: "While viewing The Stranger (1946) recently, I was moved by Robinson’s personal stake in the film, as a Jewish actor playing a Nazi hunter. Writing an exphrastic poem seemed to be the best way to comment on the crime against him: while celebrating Robinson's stance against fascism, the industry still regarded him as a racial outsider, which the HUAC would soon continue. My thanks to fellow film noir researcher Dean Goldberg."


MATTHEW SORRENTO is Editor-in-Chief of Retreats from Oblivion, a journal of noir, crime, and mystery fiction and culture, and Co-editor of Film International. I write about and teach genre cinema at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. The author of The New American Crime Film (McFarland, 2012), I have two books forthcoming, on David Fincher's Zodiac and Film Noir and the Blacklist (both with FDU Press).