Customer Reviews

Film Noir: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Reference to Movies, Terms, and Persons

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This costly reference book, which aims at exhaustiveness, is severely compromised by errors and omissions. Quite obviously a labor of love, it desperately needed the services of a fact-checker or ruthless proofreader. As published, it fails to achieve the authoritativeness it craves. For example: TWICE Audrey Totter in The Lady in The Lake is misidentified as Claire Trevor -- this in picture captions! Neither Joan Crawford's nomination for nor winning of the 1945 Oscar for best actress as Mildred Pierce is mentioned in the entry on Academy Awards for films noirs. An entry on Lloyd Noland includes a critique of a role in Brute Force, in which he did not appear; the part was played by Hume Cronyn. Geoffrey Homes is given as the pseudonym not of screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring but of cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. And so on. In general, the author works from a limited noir filmography, omitting many relevant works (Desert Fury, to name only one). Steven's value judgements are often of interest, though his critical vocabulary seems limited (performances are often described merely as "good" or "very good."). The work retains value as a compendium of information about the film noir cycle in encyclopedic form, and is strong on neglected members of the team such as art directors and composers. Unfortunately, it's far from complete and very far from trustworthy.

apart from the fact that even the revised edition still contains minor but embarassing errors (e.g. Thieves' Highway credited to Nicholas Ray in one place), i was even more astonished to find exact phrases from other sources in this book, e.g. descriptions of features of actors Edmund O'Brien and Charles McGraw taken from Bruce Crowther's book on film noir. Stephen's book needs intense reworking though, to be honest, i doubt that i will ever see one.