San Antonio College Library

Sheri Chinen Biesen challenges conventional thinking on the origins of film noir and finds the genre's roots in the political, social and historical conditions of Hollywood during the Second World War.

Noted film noir historians Alain Silver and James Ursini, acting as editors, concentrate in this work on the thirty key directors of the classic noir period. These include well-known luminaries, such as Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Nicholas Ray, and Joseph Losey as well as lesser-known lights of noir, such as Gerd Oswald, Felix E. Feist, Ida Lupino, and John Brahm. Each article will include a short biography of the director, a list of their major noir...

"In America Noir David Cochran details how ten writers and filmmakers probed the Cold War's cultural contradictions and indirectly challenged its social pieties: the superiority of American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family." "Cochran argues that these artists pioneered a detached, ironic sensibility in fictions that radically juxtaposed cultural references and blurred the distinctions between "high"...