Film Noir Prototypes is the latest in a fascinating, intensively researched series of film noir readers by genre experts Alain Silver and James Ursini. It’s a beautifully produced, richly illustrated volume that takes one or two surprising detours – Silver’s chapter on the ‘Proto-noir motifs in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis’ is especially enlightening, and fans of Universal Horror will be intrigued by Ursini’s essay about The Mummy and The Black Cat (possibly the best and most underrated of Universal’s spookfests.) Other highlights include two especially good opening chapters about the relationship between German Expressionism and Film Noir and (if you’re a fan of femme fatales) Looking Back – Victorinoir, which charts the representation of women in noir from the early pre-cinema days of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and H Rider Haggard’s She, through Stoker’s Dracula and Le Fanu’s Carmilla, to the original femme fatales of the silent screen – Theda Bara and the eternally luminous Louise Brooks. Although it mostly limits itself to exploring how Victorian conceptions of class, gender and ‘aberrant’ sexuality informed what the modern femme fatale would eventually become, it’s an exploration that could easily have been expanded into a book of its own and still kept us hooked from the first page to the last. Unfortunately, it’s over too soon. A later chapter, about the influence of the censorship code on Double Indemnity’s evolution from novel to screen, is a gem as well.
But that’s also the biggest problem with Film Noir Prototypes – where the five chapters we’ve just mentioned are detailed yet generalised enough to hold the attention of most literate films fans, many of the remaining chapters go into significant depth about lesser known films that only the really hardcore noir viewer will be familiar with. Yes, there are welcome mentions of classics like Laura, Rebecca and In a Lonely Place but Silver, Ursini and their contributors also give a lot of focus to movies most of us have probably never had the chance to enjoy – Black Angel, The Face Behind the Mask, and The Musketeers of Pig Alley for example – which makes reading those chapters an interesting but also frustrating experience. And it would have been nice if the midpoint chapter on film noir graphics could have been a colour insert because the posters they’ve chosen are wonderful.
Still, despite its slight lean towards the know-it-all film scholar, Film Noir Prototypes is an engrossing excursion into a genre which is much more than square-jawed gumshoes, hot broads with killer gams, and xeroxed versions of Cagney-like gangsters yelling variations of “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” We just wish Silver and Ursini had limited their choice of films to ones we could actually watch after we’d read their chapters.
FILM NOIR PROTOTYPES / AUTHORS: ALAIN SILVER, JAMES URSINI / PUBLISHER: APPLAUSE THEATRE BOOK PUBLISHERS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
