There are very many books on both the American post-war years and the films of the long 1950s, usually with the emphasis on a genre or a sociological topic. The book at hand, however, has a somewhat special approach, as it is preoccupied with the decade and its implications on the American public, as experienced […]
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Tag: Film Noir
British Thrillers, 1950–1979 … by Franz Antony Clinton (2020)
The era from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s probably was the busiest period of the British film industry. Many thrillers were shot in those years, including a great number of movies (and B movies) that often featured American actors; this arrangement would draw audiences to cinemas in England and simultaneously ensure interest for moviegoers […]
Law Enforcement in American Cinema, 1894-1952 by George Beck (2020)
In this short title, author George Beck takes a close look at some movies of the first half of the twentieth century that employed representations of American law enforcement, starting with silent era productions and chronologically end with films noir. Five sections altogether and a final coda chapter on roughly 130 pages consider stereotypes, good […]
Film Noir Style: The Killer 1940s by Kimberly Truhler (2020)
What may come to mind first whenever the visual aspects of the genre film noir are discussed, may be the dark atmosphere, the sharp contrast of light and shadow, and people in desperate situations whose actions echoed brilliantly the many original hard-boiled scripts and novel adaptations usually associated with the stlye. One aspect halfway neglected, […]
Musik im klassischen Film noir by Janina Müller (German) (2019)
Janina Müller’s study (“Music in classic film noir”) takes a close look at the scores of mostly the popular films noir and a few rather unknown ones. Here it means studying, juxtaposing and evaluating the scores of several films, while their uniqueness in comparison with standard Hollywood movies is questioned. As there is hardly one […]
From Ameche to Zozzled: A Glossary of Hard-Boiled Slang of the 1920s through the 1940s by Joe Tradii (2018)
The hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and the many films noir later, apart from several other similarities, shared a special gangster jargon and street-wise language that lent an extra air of authenticity to those works. As the many weird expressions, prohibition-time lingo, proverbs and often sexists, racist and plainly offensive words used there quickly went […]
Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game. The Way It Never Sounded by Andra Ivănescu (2019)
Without doubt, video games have become a part of the popular culture; with some aspects of the game culture also introduced (and marketed) in the non-virtual present in the form of merchandise, costumes, action figures and so forth. It is a huge market – while gaming now has obtained the status of a cultural practice […]
Urban Noir: New York and Los Angeles in Shadow and Light by James J. Ward and Cynthia J. Miller (eds.) (2017)
Both Los Angeles and New York City have been of particular interest to movie producers, especially to those who shot drama that was later called film noir. The authors want to dig deeper to unearth the reasons for those locations, since the ”… inescapable question, then, is: Why this animosity toward the two cities that, […]
Dark City. The Real Los Angeles Noir by Jim Heimann (2018)
With Dark City a very unusual portrait of an American city is now available. It impresses with many pictures of the city of angels that show the really shadowy sides, the ones that inhabitants from the early 1910s until the 1950s experienced, and that provided the soil and inspiration for many novels and movies. As […]