American classic films noir, beginning with 1941's The Maltese Falcon and ending with 1950's Sunset Boulevard, and the neo-noir films made from the 1970s onward, share certain thematic aspects, stylistic qualities, and cultural contexts. Their concern with politics, their depiction of con artists, and the way their characters are shaped by America's puritanical religious roots show that these films are examples of a unique American genre, even when the films' directors are German emigres with artistic roots in European Expressionism. The films' psychological depth is revealed stylistically through complex narratives, with select directors generating visual poetry as they deal with sex, violence and betrayal. Some films are based on popular novels inspired by true crime cases. A unique approach to film noir scholarship, this book discusses the genre's thematic aspects, cultural contexts and stylistic qualities. For those films based upon novels, in-depth analysis of the fiction is provided alongside the film version, resulting in a fuller, more thorough understanding of the genre.

This text identifies a handful of plot elements that consistently recur within film noir and analyses in depth the memorable pictures that, while being vivid prototypes of certain cinematics themes, bend and break their moulds to find new ways to enthral and frighten us.

Now thoroughly revised and updated, the book discusses recent breakthroughs in media technology, including such exciting advances as video discs and cassettes, two-way television, satellites, cable and much more.

With the revived use of film noir by such contemporary directors as Scorsese, Altman, and the Coen brothers, there has been heightened public and academic interest in the film noir as a genre movement and style. In this Perspectives volume, French theories of film noir are discussed with translations of key book reviews, essays and articles. Anglo-American theory and criticism - especially scholarship from the 1980s - illuminates social, literary and philosophical contexts of film noir in the 1940s, and the revival of its themes, style and subject matters in the 1970s and 1980s.

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