The Rough Guide to Film Noir

"More ambitious than most of the other entries in the field, this volume sports more sections, including informative sidebars. The interesting thing about film noir is that, although it’s a quintessentially American form, it wouldn’t exist but for German expressionism – an issue addressed here. “Although it’s a quintessentially American form, film noir wouldn’t exist but for German expressionism” So, a director like Fritz Lang comes across from Germany, having made films such as Metropolis , and is definitely an important director. In America he thought he was making cheap crime movies but now we see that is not true. Now we appreciate that The Ministry of Fear , set in Britain, is one of the great films noirs, and German expressionism was a huge influence on the whole form. Another ex-pat was Robert Siodmak. These two great German directors came to America and gave a visual style to film noir. Hitchcock, of course, was English – so the look and style of film noir was mostly defined by foreigners such as these. The Rough Guide to Film Noir discusses all those elements, including the cinematographers (one of the sections I worked on in this book). John Alton. He is a genius who made the work of directors such as Anthony Mann look even better. The classic image of men in trench coats and hats silhouetted against smoky, rainy streets. No. It’s most often the innocent man led astray. The theme was done as recently as Body Heat , and many times since then. The great modern film noir is Polanski’s Chinatown . People went in their droves to see this wide-screen colour film, which, nevertheless, is a film noir transformed, with its sun-baked Las Vegas landscapes. And, of course, The Dark Knight and Batman Begins both have that look. Gotham City is basically a film noir landscape. The Rough Guide takes in films like this in a way that the other books don’t. The others mostly concentrate on the 1940s."