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The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir
By Foster Hirsch.
Published by Da Capo.
2nd edition.
Published 2008.
Paperback.
ISBN-10: 0306817721
ISBN-13: 978-0306817724
Description:
Foster Hirsch's Dark
Side of the Screen is by far the most thorough and entertaining study of
the themes, visual motifs, character types, actors, directors, and films in
this genre ever published. From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and
Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir
themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing
cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan
Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are
carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and
story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as
noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive
history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many
illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for
further research.
“Wonderfully readable:
Hirsch is clear, knowledgeable, and concise….[The Dark Side of the Screen]
is a visual as well as literary pleasure.” – Martin Jackson, Cineaste.
“There has been no
extended work as good as Foster Hirsch’s The Dark Side of the Screen, a
well-written, imaginatively illustrated book that sees the brief, true heyday
as between Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and his Sunset Boulevard
(1950), but looks at the prelude and the aftermath, and sets the genre in its
larger social and cultural context.” – Philip French, The Observer
(London).
“An
important examination of what film noir is…The 264-page treatise is not a
review source; rather, Hirsch’s academic work delves deeply with a scholarly
but not dry approach.” – Skyscraper, Spring 2009.
