From the author of The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Cinema and Postmodern Hollywood (2020), comes this riveting history of the film noir genre. The first wave of the noir film genre began with 1941’s The Maltese Falcon and ended with 1958’s Touch of Evil; but, as Booker argues persuasively, this was only the beginning of film noir. Later came the neo-noir films (eg., Chinatown, 1974) and the revisionary noirs (Basic Instinct, 1992), which incorporated key elements of the noir tradition but took the themes in new directions. Noir came about in part because some German filmmakers—Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and others—fled Hitler’s Germany and came to the United States; the genre got its name from French film critics, who were searching for something that unified the various films coming out of the U.S. that tackled subjects forbidden by the Production Code through the use of shadow and subtext. The book contains plot summaries, but this is not merely a book full of plot summaries. This is one of the best, best written, most insightful analyses of film noir, and it demands to be read by fans of film history.
