Friday, August 5 2011
Pull a Thread to Find a String and Get the Rope: ‘Kiss Me Deadly’
One of the all-time great film noirs, a must-see classic on its own, Kiss Me Deadly only gets better with a wonderful slew of extras.
Friday, July 22 2011
‘Pale Flower’: Living for Death
Into this movie's milieu of prison terms, all-night gambling sessions and literal and figurative back-stabbings arrives a dewy young woman named Saeko (pronounced, more or less, 'psycho') who is very young and very tired of life.
Friday, August 27 2010
Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II’ Is Uneven, But With a Few Bleakly Satisfying Moments
In Human Desire, one of the five films included here, Broderick Crawford is one of those big lugs whose volume control dial has been permanently stuck somewhere between "bluster" and "bellow."
Thursday, April 15 2010
Noir: A Novel by Robert Coover
This book is a compendium of noir clichés, each one twisted to Coover’s purpose, which is to repurpose noir into a metaphor for existence itself
Monday, March 3 2008
The Dark Page by Kevin Johnson
Offering a scrupulous listing of the novels, plays, and other literary sources that inspired great noir productions of the 1940s, this is bibliophilia with heart and cinephilia with brains.
Wednesday, July 25 2007
The Gangster Film Reader by Alain Silver and James Ursini [Eds]
In an age when gangsters have given way to gangstas, it's refreshing to find a book that takes the older breed seriously.
