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From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity … by Alain Silver and James Ursini (2024)

When in July 1944 Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity hit American cinemas, it was only moderately successful. The movie performed well enough at the box office to be considered reasonably profitable, with estimated earnings between $2.2 and $2.6 million, which was sufficient to return a good profit for Paramount Studios. The film ranked 51st in box […]

Noir Fiction and Film: Diversions and Misdirections by Lee Clark Mitchell (2022)

With some interesting observations and a huge collection of data about genres in the book under discussion here, there are some good and fresh points concerning style, method and procedure, even when hard-boiled fiction and films noir are reduced to their most basic configurations. Naturally, there are variations of the stereotypes and, with regard to […]

Urban Noir: New York and Los Angeles in Shadow and Light by James J. Ward and Cynthia J. Miller (eds...

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 two locations, since the ”… inescapable question, then, is: Why this animosity toward the two cities […]