American noir film From the Maltese Falcon to Gone Girl

Review by Booklist Review

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.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This perceptive history from Booker (Star Trek), an English professor at the University of Arkansas, traces film noir's enduring influence on American cinema from its 1940s origins through the present. According to Booker, the genre drew from German expressionism's "inventive use of light and shadows" to express wartime malaise and disillusionment with the American Dream. Tracing noir's evolution through exegesis of Double Indemnity, Blue Velvet, Inherent Vice, and other films, Booker argues that 1941's The Maltese Falcon aimed to rebut "saccharine" standard Hollywood fare by depicting life as a "ruthless dog-eat-dog pursuit of wealth." The fall of the Motion Picture Production Code in the late '60s produced a wave of "neo-noir" films (Chinatown and Body Heat principally among them) freed from restrictions on ridiculing the law or showing sympathy with criminals, allowing filmmakers to portray the world as even bleaker and more corrupt than the original noirs had. More recent films create meaning by toying with noir conventions, Booker contends, suggesting that by focusing Gone Girl on a femme fatale who ultimately prevails, director David Fincher implicitly indicts early noirs for their inability to envision a female character's successful challenge to patriarchy. By putting noirs from across film history in conversation, Booker's smart commentary sheds light on how the genre has been retooled and repurposed according to changing attitudes. Cinephiles will be enthralled. (Nov.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

This compact history of Hollywood noir films from the 1940s through today discusses the nature of the genre and how it's changed over time, then moves to the analysis of specific movies. Movies are grouped into three subsets--detective films, lost-man films, and femme-fatale films--across the variant forms of noir, neo-noir, and revisionary noir. The earliest film discussed is The Maltese Falcon (1941); the most recent is 2020's Promising Young Woman. Booker ("Mad Men": A Cultural History) posits that classic noir's shadowy style was indebted to German Expressionist films of the 1920s and '30s and constrained by war economies and the restrictions imposed by a puritanical Production Code. With the mid-1950s came changes in audience tastes and the ascendancy of color over black and white film. Neo-noir emerged in the '60s and ran through the '90s, with many revisionary noir titles appearing in the 21st century, retaining classic noir's unforgivingly pessimistic view of society but incorporating elements from other movie genres, playing games with them, and posing new questions. VERDICT A well-written introduction to noir films and how the genre has continued to thrive as times changed.--David Keymer

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