Author: James J. Ward
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442278331
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
This collection of essays examines how New York and Los Angeles are depicted in noir and neo-noir films from the 1940s through the 21st century. These essays consider how the architectural sights and city sounds inform such films as Cotton Comes to Harlem, Drive, Kiss of Death, Naked City, and Nightcrawler, among others.
Author: William Hare
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786437405
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Los Angeles is an ideal city for film noir for both economic and aesthetic reasons. The largest metropolitan area in the country, home to an ever-changing population of the disillusioned and in close proximity to city, mountains, ocean, and desert, the City of Angels became a center of American film noir. This detailed discussion of nine films explores such topics as why certain settings are appropriate for film noir, why L.A. has been a favorite of authors such as Raymond Chandler, and relevant political developments in the area. The films are also examined in terms of story content as well as how they developed in the project stage. Utilizing a number of quotes from interviews, the work examines actors, directors, and others involved with the films, touching on their careers and details of their time in L.A. The major films covered are The Big Sleep, Criss Cross, D.O.A., In A Lonely Place, The Blue Gardenia, Kiss Me Deadly, The Killing, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential.
Author: Sean W. Maher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351396838
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
This book combines film studies with urban theory in a spatial exploration of twentieth century Los Angeles. Configured through the dark lens of noir, the author examines an alternate urban history of Los Angeles forged by the fictional modes of detective fiction, film noir and neo noir. Dark portrayals of the city are analyzed in Raymond Chandler’s crime fiction through to key films like Double Indemnity (1944) and The End of Violence (1997). By employing these fictional elements as the basis for historicising the city’s unrivalled urban form, the analysis demonstrates an innovative approach to urban historiography. Revealing some of the earliest tendencies of postmodern expression in Hollywood cinema, this book will be of great relevance to students and researchers working in the fields of film, literature, cultural and urban studies. It will also be of interest to scholars researching histories of Los Angeles and the American noir imagination.
Author: John Buntin
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307352080
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
Now the TNT Original Series MOB CITY Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world’s most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men—one L.A.’ s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief—each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city.
Author: Sam Wasson
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250301831
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. and Fosse comes the revelatory account of the making of a modern American masterpiece Chinatown is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. Its twist ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue the most haunting. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making. In Sam Wasson's telling, it becomes the defining story of the most colorful characters in the most colorful period of Hollywood history. Here is Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers, as compelling a movie star as there has ever been, embarking on his great, doomed love affair with Anjelica Huston. Here is director Roman Polanski, both predator and prey, haunted by the savage death of his wife, returning to Los Angeles, the scene of the crime, where the seeds of his own self-destruction are quickly planted. Here is the fevered dealmaking of "The Kid" Robert Evans, the most consummate of producers. Here too is Robert Towne's fabled script, widely considered the greatest original screenplay ever written. Wasson for the first time peels off layers of myth to provide the true account of its creation. Looming over the story of this classic movie is the imminent eclipse of the '70s filmmaker-friendly studios as they gave way to the corporate Hollywood we know today. In telling that larger story, The Big Goodbye will take its place alongside classics like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and The Devil's Candy as one of the great movie-world books ever written. Praise for Sam Wasson: "Wasson is a canny chronicler of old Hollywood and its outsize personalities...More than that, he understands that style matters, and, like his subjects, he has a flair for it." - The New Yorker "Sam Wasson is a fabulous social historian because he finds meaning in situations and stories that would otherwise be forgotten if he didn't sleuth them out, lovingly." - Hilton Als
Author: Kimberly Truhler
Publisher: Paladin Communications
ISBN: 1735273805
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 491
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Book Description
Film Noir Style: The Killer 1940s looks at the fashions of the femmes fatales who were so good at being bad, and the suits and trench coats of definitive noir actors such as Humphrey Bogart and Alan Ladd. Film and fashion historian Kimberly Truhler explores twenty definitive film noir titles from 1941 to 1950 and traces the evolution of popular fashion in the decade of the '40s, the impact of World War II on home-front fashion, and the influence of the film noir genre on popular fashion then and now. Meet not only the fabulous women of noir, including Betty Grable, Veronica Lake, Gene Tierney, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Ava Gardner, and many others, but also the costume designers that created and recreated these famous stars as killers—and worse—through the clothes they wore.
Author: Jim Heimann
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780811823197
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
New in town, huh? Look around, kidpalm trees, movie stars, glittering promises of fame and fortune....Now look closer, and you'll see the real action in the City of Angels: goons and thugs, backroom dice clubs, motel room cheesecake shots, crusading cops, and a few unlucky saps who didn't make it out alive. Sins of the City is a daring photographic compendium of vintage vice in Los Angeles from the '20s to the '50s, the true-life pictures of a milieu immortalized in the hard-bitten novels of Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley, and James Ellroy, and such films as Criss Cross, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, and LA Confidential. Pore over 200 shots of the people, places, and events that only tabloids such as Hush-Hush, Confidential, and Whisper dared publish. Witness the LAPD bust a floating casino, see a dapper Bugsy Siegel "before" (living) and "after" (deeply deceased), and marvel at the criminal excess of marijuana-stuffed suitcases. Author Jim Heimann has scoured archives and newspaper morgues for prime examples of Southland's inglorious past, presenting a compelling history of its notorious corruption. Sure, it's a tough city, but thankfully someone was there to record it all.
Author: Mark Shiel
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861899408
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Hollywood cinema and Los Angeles cannot be understood apart. Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles traces the interaction of the real city, its movie business, and filmed image, focusing on the crucial period from the construction of the first studios in the 1910s to the decline of the studio system fifty years later. As Los Angeles gradually became one of the ten largest cities in the world, the film industry made key contributions to its rapid growth and frequent crises in economic, social, political and cultural life. Whether filmmakers engaged with the real city on location or recreated it on a studio set, Los Angeles shaped the films that were made there and circulated influentially worldwide. The book pays particular attention to early cinema, slapstick comedy, movies about the movies and film noir, which are each explored in new ways, with an emphasis on urban and architectural space and its representation, as well as filmmaking style and technique. Including many previously unpublished photographs and new historical evidence, Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles gives us a never-before-seen view of the City of Angels.
Author: Dahlia Schweitzer
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 081359636X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
L.A. Private Eyes examines the tradition of the private eye as it evolves in films, books, and television shows set in Los Angeles from the 1930's through the present day. This book explores the metamorphosis of the solitary detective figure and the many facets of the genre itself.
Author: William Hare
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786483648
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
The name is French and it has connections to German expressionist cinema, but film noir was inspired by the American Raymond Chandler, whose prose was marked by the gripping realism of seedy hotels, dimly lit bars, main streets, country clubs, mansions, cul-de-sac apartments, corporate boardrooms, and flop houses of America. Chandler and the other writers and directors, including James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Jane Greer, Ken Annakin, Rouben Mamoulian and Mike Mazurki, who were primarily responsible for the creation of the film noir genre and its common plots and themes, are the main focus of this work. It correlates the rise of film noir with the new appetites of the American public after World War II and explains how it was developed by smaller studios and filmmakers as a result of the emphasis on quality within a deliberately restricted element of cities at night. The author also discusses how RKO capitalized on films such as Murder, My Sweet and Out of the Past--two of film noir's most famous titles--and film noir's connection to British noir and the great international triumph of Sir Carol Reed in The Third Man.
