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Of interest -
Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir
John T. Irwin
Johns Hopkins University Press: 290 pp., $45
From the Richard Schickel review of this book in the Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2007 -
… there has undoubtedly been more heavy-duty writing about noir than about any other genre - which includes disputes about whether it really is a genre. This endlessly fascinates both academics and film buffs, in part because so many of the films of noir's classic era, which Schrader dates from 1941 to 1953, are so seductively realized - well-written, handsomely directed (all those shadows, rain-wet streets, blinking neon signs) and played with such harsh authority, often by otherwise quite ordinary actors.
… Noir is not a realistic style. It's a transformative one, imparting to the city and its denizens a sort of darkly glamorous menace. As Schrader observes, it rarely rains in Los Angeles, one of noir's prime venues, yet the streets are always wet with rain, and the fog is always rolling in. The same is true of the writing in these films. The pace and wit of the often outrageously strained metaphors of the voice-over narrations (see "Double Indemnity," "The Big Sleep," "Out of the Past" and a dozen lesser works) are not "real." They are as stylized as the forced lighting and the settings.
No wonder noir is so hard to find out here.
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