My guilty pleasure is watching Noir Alley on TCM each week since its inception. My PVR is set so that I can analyze each episode from front to back. Eddie Muller is more than a curator for the show. He is a raconteur of the highest degree. I am blown away by his cinematic knowledge of the genre and how each actor is woven into the Noir milieu. He weaves a delicate tapestry of words that entice you to watch on go beyond as a casual viewer. From femmes fatales to killers, the Noir landscape has a set of rules but also a few twists here and there. Muller challenges us with new offerings that do not fit the conventional definition of Film Noir.
If you watch Noir Alley and read Eddie Muller’s Dark City revised and expanded edition, you will be blasted with a cornucopia of information about the origins and politics of the Film Noir from all the creators. The creators lived lives as complicated as their characters. Muller’s book is more than a picture book, it’s the top book on Film Noir movies. Muller has single-handed created a Film Noir universe, from actors to writers, many jumped from movie to movie. Dark City is a great read into old Hollywood and a genre long gone, often imitated, never duplicated. I never put down Dark City, Muller is a wordsmith of the highest caliber. This is the definitive book on Film Noir.
This revised and expanded edition of Eddie Muller’s Dark City is a film noir lover’s bible, taking readers on a tour of the urban landscape of the grim and gritty genre in a definitive, highly illustrated volume.
Dark Cityexpands with new chapters and a fresh collection of restored photos that illustrate the mythic landscape of the imagination. It’s a place where the men and women who created film noir often find themselves dangling from the same sinister heights as the silver-screen avatars to whom they gave life. Eddie Muller, the host of Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley, takes readers on a spellbinding trip through treacherous terrain: Hollywood in the post-World War II years, where art, politics, scandal, style — and brilliant craftsmanship — produced a new approach to moviemaking, and a new type of cultural mythology.
Eddie Muller, aka the “Czar of Noir,” is the host of TCM’s Noir Alley franchise, and the prolific author of novels, biographies, movie histories, plays, and films. He also programs and hosts the “Noir City” film festival series, curates museums, and provides commentary for television, radio, and DVDs. As founder of the Film Noir Foundation, Muller has been instrumental in restoring and preserving more than thirty lost noir classics. He resides in Alameda, CA.