Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
“Each of us is in some way or another, and in succession, a criminal and a saint.“
— Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948)
My tastes range wide in movies, but top place goes to film noir, described by the Oxford Languages Dictionary as “a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.”
“The term was originally applied (by a group of French critics) to American thriller or detective films made in the period 1944–54 and to the work of directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.”
In “Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir” (Running Press Adult, $20.99), San Francisco-based Eddie Muller (the “Czar of noir”) explores several tropes of the genre: Vixenville (the femme fatale), the City Desk (newspaper grift), the Psych Ward, Thieves’ Highway (crime on the road), The Big House (prison movies).
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.