I’ve been watching film noir movies as part of “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies, because I like stories of people living on the fringes of society, making bad decisions, and spiraling downward.  Plus it is interesting to come across actors I know from much later works.  For example, I used to watch Raymond Burr as good-guy lawyer Perry Mason, so it is interesting to see him as a violent heavy in a movie like “Raw Deal”.

The series started in 2017 with host Eddie Muller who is a film noir affectionado, hosting film festivals, publishing a magazine, and working to restore old films from this era.  He wrote the original “Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir” back in 1998.  This is a revised edition released in 2021.

The book talks about representative movies from the era, grouped by different aspects.  Corrupt cops,  newspaper men tracking a corruption story, femme fatale’s, etc.  It is organized as if there was a virtual “Dark City” with different parts of town (Sinister Heights, Shamus Flats, etc.).  The analogy is a bit forced at times, but if you dropped all these references and kept the chapter titles, the book would be just as good.

It was a trip to read the book while watching the series.  I’d read about a film where some newspaper men ending up in a car wreck on the beach and realize I had watched “High Tide” earlier in the day.  You definitely need to be into these kinds of films to appreciate the book, but I enjoyed it.  I probably should have created a checklist of films to watch while I read it.