With the advent of the Great Depression, Hollywood discovered new characters and fresh labels of films that displayed the effects of the economic struggle on various types of individuals, be it the small-time crook, the innocent and wrongly accused businessman, the farmer or the simple secretary. All of them had to face new obstacles in […]
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Category: B. R. Film
Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream by Mark Osteen (2013)
By choosing the rather bleak Edmund Goulding noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947) as the namesake for his new book, author Mark Osteen surprises with his fresh approach to films noir. He concentrates on the major antagonists, so to speak, of the American dream, and the American pursuit of happiness, a constitutional right in a way. […]
Mystery Movie Series of 1930s Hollywood by Ron Backer (2012)
There was a time when mystery stories were not written for the screen exclusively but were meant to be published and read by an audience. These texts, however, were the foundations for almost all the major mystery series listed in Backer’s book; as were some of the best film noir movies prior to Hollywood’s remodeling […]
Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings by J. von Molke (2012)
When Siegfried Kracauer and his wife Lili in 1941 finally could escape the Nazi regime and left for New York fleeing Marseilles via Portugal the future of film criticism would have a fresh start … or have its initial start, depending on your point of view. Sharing the fate of many of today’s intellectuals and […]
Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy by Robert B. Pippin (2012)
Whenever you hear a character in the next film noir you are watching say something that sounds a lot like sarcasm, heavy irony or simply like the words of a doomed man… you may have caught one of the moments Professor Pippin uses to build a whole theory. Build it around the attitude, not the […]
In Lonely Places. Film Noir Beyond the City by Imogen Sara Smith (2011)
There seem to be specific instances that make a particular type of movie clearly identifiable as belonging to a certain group. For example, we like to have deserts, gunfights and horses if we watch a western movie, and we may look out for earrings, battleships, sabers and the Jolly Roger when we watch a pirates […]
The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War by Richard Lingeman (2012)
Let us put aside for a moment the rather usual and thus “uncritical” approach to the USA in the 1940s and 1950s as a cultural, political and national whole; and now let us try to experience that world through the eyes of a fictional character in a Film Noir. Then we would sense the many […]
Film Noir Graphics: Where Danger Lives by Alain Silver and James Ursini (2012)
So there comes another promising title by professional collaborators team Alain Silver and James Ursini, two critics, collectors and authors of books and journals on movie directors, film industry, and film noir in particular. By their mere output, the two authors today form part of the canon of modern film noir appreciation. The reader then […]
Out of the Shadows: Expanding the Canon of Classic Film Noir by Gene D. Phillips (2011)
Since the last two years saw an enormous wave of reissues of vintage crime novels – mostly out of print and now hard to find hard-boiled mystery – often being the source document for movies of the film-noir genre, it is not at all surprising to witness a growing interest in the movies of that […]