Columbia Noir

This filmography covers Columbia Pictures’ noir titles released in the classic noir era, October 1940 to June 1962. All sub-genres are covered including British, western and science fiction. Included are the great Columbia films Gilda, Lady from Shanghai, All the Kings Men, In a Lonely Place, On the Waterfront, Anatomy of a Murder and Experiment in Terror. The films are examined in detail, with release dates, cast and production credits, production dates, synopses, reviews, notes and commentary on each film, the author’s summation and the publicity “tag lines.”

This filmography covers Columbia Pictures' noir titles released in the classic noir era, October 1940 to June 1962. All sub-genres are covered including British, western and science fiction. Included are the great Columbia films Gilda, Lady from Shanghai, All the Kings Men, In a Lonely Place, On the Waterfront, Anatomy of a Murder and Experiment in Terror. The films are examined in detail, with release dates, cast and production credits, production dates, synopses, reviews, notes and commentary on each film, the author's summation and the publicity "tag lines."

Drawing on previously untapped archival materials including letters, interviews, and more, Bernard F. Dick traces the history of Columbia Pictures, from its beginnings as the CBC Film Sales Company, through the regimes of Harry Cohn and his successors, and ending with a vivid portrait of today's corporate Hollywood. The book offers unique perspectives on the careers of Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday, a discussion of Columbia's unique brands of screwball comedy and film noir, and analyses of such classics as The Awful Truth, Born Yesterday, and From Here to Eternity. Following the author's highly readable studio chronicle are fourteen original essays by leading film scholars that follow Columbia's emergence from Poverty Row status to world class, and the stars, films, genres, writers, producers, and directors responsible for its transformation. A new essay on Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood rounds out the collection and brings this seminal studio history into the 21st century. Amply illustrated with film stills and photos of stars and studio heads, Columbia Pictures is the first book to integrate history with criticism of a single studio, and is ideal for film lovers and scholars alike.

Lighting performs essential functions in Hollywood films, enhancing the glamour, clarifying the action, and intensifying the mood. Examining every facet of this understated art form, from the glowing backlights of the silent period to the shaded alleys of film noir, Patrick Keating affirms the role of Hollywood lighting as a distinct, compositional force. Closely analyzing Girl Shy (1924), Anna Karenina (1935), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and T-Men (1947), along with other brilliant classics, Keating describes the unique problems posed by these films and the innovative ways cinematographers handled the challenge. Once dismissed as crank-turning laborers, these early cinematographers became skillful professional artists by carefully balancing the competing demands of story, studio, and star. Enhanced by more than one hundred illustrations, this volume counters the notion that style took a backseat to storytelling in Hollywood film, proving that the lighting practices of the studio era were anything but neutral, uniform, and invisible. Cinematographers were masters of multifunctionality and negotiation, honing their craft to achieve not only realistic fantasy but also pictorial artistry.

The Quarantine Review is a literary journal created to alleviate the malaise of social distancing with exceptional writing and artwork. During this trying time, the journal aims to lift spirits and engage minds with stimulating poetry, works of fiction, and art, while also publishing opinion pieces, personal essays, and cultural commentary.

Neo-noir knows its past. It knows the rules of the game – and how to break them. From Point Blank (1998) to Oldboy (2003), from Get Carter (2000) to 36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004), from Catherine Tramell to Max Payne, neo-noir is a transnational global phenomenon. This wide-ranging collection maps out the terrain, combining genre, stylistic and textual analysis with Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic and industrial approaches. Essays discuss works from the US, UK, France, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and New Zealand; key figures, such as David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino and Sharon Stone; major conventions, such as the femme fatale, paranoia, anxiety, the city and the threat to the self; and the use of sound and colour.

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.

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.