Customer Reviews

Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir

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Andrew Dickos has written both a brilliant overview of the history and development of film noir -- tracing it back to German films of the 20s and French movie from the 30s -- and an astute examination of individual works and filmmakers.

The author's writing style is sharp and lively and his critiques of the movies are incisive, original and provocative.

A fascinating book; a must-have for the serious movie fan.

Which is the presumed motive for this extended revisitation of an extensively analyzed subject. This book is bizarrely organized which somewhat masks the fact that it has almost nothing new to say. Odd comments aside ("...the casual amorality of Chandlerian violence"?!?), the text is little more than a series of introductory remarks with thumbnail bios of hardboiled writers and auteurist asides that cobble together plot summaries and allusions to the writings of other critics. Chapter 4 starts off with promise but fizzles. The extended closing comments on the French New Wave, the epilog, and the needlessly repeated selected credits are pure filler.

To give Dickos credit, he has an interesting discussion of pre-war French "poetic realism" and post-war French films of the noir era and notes the differences between them. That is new and different.

However, much of what he does in this book has been done elsewhere and better (books by Spicer, Naremore, Palmer, and Christopher for example.) I found the book's organization to be poor. For example he opens with a discussion of German Expressionism in the pre-1933 era, but then leaps to a discussion of Fritz Lang's films and then Robert Siodmak's films. Then he has the discussion of French proto-noir. When he gets to the classic noir era of 1941-58, he has some topics but mostly he does director surveys, and I couldn't see why he dealt with the directors in that order.

So if you don't have many books on noir, you may find something of interest here. If you have read the books I've mentioned earlier, or have the Silver and Ursini encyclopedia, you don't need to get this book.