Homme blanc, homme noir

When viewers think of film noir, they often picture actors like Humphrey Bogart playing characters like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, the film based on the book by Dashiell Hamm...

The working premise of this chapter is that, in the 1950s, film noir and anticommunism form a double helix and that even the most notorious of these “red menace” films—The Whip Han...

This chapter examines the impact of noir aesthetic in the work of the Walt Disney Studio, which produced some of the most pointedly noir-styled cartoons of the period. The most not...

Part one of this chapter examines the production history of The Woman on Pier 13 to highlight the ideological mutability of the film’s ostensible, “right-wing” agenda, one endorsed...

Orson Welles' classic 1958 noir movie Touch of Evil, the story of a corrupt police chief in a small town on the Mexican-American border, starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and M...

This chapter studies noir's twin genre, the woman's film. While this genre's formal politics are quite similar to noir's, its focus on female identity entails a representation of f...

This chapter looks at the '50s heist picture—a subgenre of '50s gangster noir—examining John Huston's Asphalt Jungle (1950). In Huston's film, the criminal gang resembles nothing s...