EVERY PAINTING IS A LOVE AFFAIR. So SayS cashier and Sunday painter Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) in Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945). Cross is explaining his aesthetic principles to Katherine Kitty March (Joan Bennett), who later conspires with her lover, slimy Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), to sign Cross's paintings with her name. Yet Cross's words resonate beyond this film; indeed, they could provide epigraph for a group of early films noir that depict men falling in love with a woman's portrait.1 Three films in particular-/ Wake Up Screaming (1942), Laura (1944), and The Dark Corner (1946)- feature fetishized female images that males use to bolster their own identities orto fashion new ones. These women's portraits become, in effect, mirrors or self-portraits of men. In these retellings of Galatea/Pygmalion myth, each man ends up creator and forger of woman and of himself. The pictorial representations in films also generate two types of self-reflexivity. First, in employing typical noir device of framed narrative or flashback, films analogically replicate fashioning of these characters' framed identities within exploitative perspectives. Second, their stories of fabricated female identities invoke Hollywood's own fabrication of female stars in studio system. A second triad of painting films- Lang's The Woman in Window (1944) and Scarlet Street and film on which latter was based, Jean Renoir's (non-noir) La Chienne (1931)employs painting to explore problems of originality, authorship, and replication. In testing relation between unconscious desire and waking life, Woman explicitly depicts its female portrait as an aspect of male psyche. Here lines between representation and viewer become nearly invisible: portrait is less a painting than a mirror. Scarlet Street multiplies reflections, at once repainting Lang's Woman and forging a copy of Renoir's film. The latter two films also stage a debate about cinematic authorship and record filmmakers' concerns about their position in a culture that devalues art in favor of commerce. Finally, little-known 1946 film Crack-Up uses an art-forgery plot to complicate further these problems of authenticity, originality, and subjectivity, posing anxious but ultimately unresolved questions about reliability of memory and pictorial representation. Blurring lines between originality and forgery, subjectivity and objectivity, and reality and representation, these films Imply that all identities are to some degree forged, that human character is too malleable and complex to be framed within a single subject or explained within a single narrative. Dreamgirls In I Wake Up Screaming, murder of model Vicky Lynn (Carole Landls) precipitates a search for her killer. Three witnesses recall, in nine flashbacks, circumstances leading to her death. Promoter Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature) relates how Vicky was discovered while working as a waitress and how she cooperated with efforts of Christopher, washed-up actor Robin Ray, and columnist Larry Evans to create her as a face. The flashback structure suggests that each narrator has imagined a somewhat different Vicky: Ray, for example, testifies that the very sight of her gave [him] new hope that he might revive his fading career. Vicky's image will refresh his image. Although Vicky insists to Frankie, a very attractive girl. You didn't create that. I'm no Frankenstein, you know, film implies that she is just that- a synthetic creature pasted together from fragments of others' aspirations. Like Charles Foster Kane, she remains a puzzle, a mirror within a mirror- a canvas on which others paint their own desires and values. Vicky's sister Jill (Betty Grable) remembers warning her, One week your face is on cover of a magazine, and next it's in asnean. Vicky dismissed admonition. …