Film Noir

Rating:
Summary: The blackest book.
Review:
Essentially a photo book of film stills with eleven chapters covering the usual subjects. If you are new to this movie style the first chapter, What is 'Noir'?, explains the fascination with the themes, archetypes, visual iconography and dialogue. The other chapters expand on these main points.

I was, though, rather disappointed with this book, Alain Silver has done it before with his definitive text book 'Film Noir: An encyclopaedic reference to the American style' (ISBN 0517464675) and also with his photo book 'The Noir Style' (ISBN 0879517220) a beautiful coffee-table title with film stills and long captions revealing the essence of these great movies.

Other disappointments include a rather narrow focus on mainly ten movies, Criss Cross, Detour, Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Kiss me Deadly, Out of the Past, The Reckless Moment, T-Men and Touch of Evil, which unfortunately does not include The Asphalt Jungle (OK, it's my favorite). No index, I really would expect one in this kind of book. The production, though beautifully printed, all the text is white out of black and I find this gets tiresome eventually, especially the tiny type of the Chronology and Bibliography, not to mention that printed matt black shows up finger marks easily.

I think the book is really only worth having as collection of movie stills and at the price is probably reasonable value.