Movies of the film noir genre, shot in the US, usually had two favorite locations when it came to large cities and a setting that would breathe the air of crime, provide sinister plots, gunmen and desperate main characters: the pictures were either set in New York City or Los Angeles. As with Los Angeles, […]
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Tag: L. A. Confidential
Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen Since 1971. A History and Discography by Derrick Bang (2020)
In the second volume of his extensive study on crime and spy movie jazz, author Bang devotes his knowledge to the years 1971 to 2019. His strategy of presenting these scores changes a bit in the present volume, as even though in the early 1970s movies were still shown in movie theaters almost exclusively, just […]
James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction by Nathan Ashman (2018)
In his masterpiece The Black Dahlia, in the first L.A. Quartet novel, James Ellroy presents a detective very much devoted to the murder of Elisabeth Short. Both Ellroy and Detective Bucky Bleichert become obsessed with the violent crime; Bleichert finally turns almost insane reconstructing both the case and the victim’s body. Ellroy in an interview […]
Dark City. The Real Los Angeles Noir by Jim Heimann (2018)
With Dark City a very unusual portrait of an American city is now available. It impresses with many pictures of the city of angels that show the really shadowy sides, the ones that inhabitants from the early 1910s until the 1950s experienced, and that provided the soil and inspiration for many novels and movies. As […]