Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 254
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-4422-7832-5 • Hardback • September 2017 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-4422-7833-2 • eBook • September 2017 • $105.50 • (£82.00)
James J. Ward is professor of history at Cedar Crest College. He has authored numerous articles focused on both film and history, and his essays have been published in such volumes as Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Republic to Zombie Porn (2015) and Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield (2015), both published by Rowman & Littlefield.
Cynthia J. Miller is a cultural anthropologist, specializing in popular culture and visual media. She is the editor or co-editor of numerous essay collections including the award-winning Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology; Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, and The Laughing Dead: The Horror Comedy from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland.She also serves as the series editor for Rowman & Littlefield’s Film and History book series and National Cinemas series.
The book is well researched and would appeal not only to film scholars but also to those interested in urban culture, human psychology, and crime. This collection offers fresh perspectives on film noir for all readers, effectively shedding new light on cities of darkness.
— Film Matters
This intriguing volume deals with some less-known films noir, although it certainly includes a solid sampling of classic examples of the genre. Ward (history, Cedar Crest College) and Miller (independent cultural anthropologist) collected an excellent group of original essays, all focused, as the title promises, around the urban jungles of New York City and Los Angeles. Receiving persuasive and informed readings are such films as Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler (2014), and Oren Moverman’s Rampart (2011), all set in the landscape of a hellish Los Angeles. Jacques Deray’s The Outside Man (1972) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Two Men in Manhattan (1959)—New York noirs both—are discussed in two standout essays, and Ossie Davis’s African American noir Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) also gets a detailed examination. There is even an essay on Jeremy Kasten’s splatter/noir The Wizard of Gore (2007), a remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 1970 film of the same name, which seems an odd choice, at least to this reviewer. This collection embraces a wide variety of films, giving them unexpected and revealing readings, and is thus a must for all noir aficionados. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, faculty and researchers, professionals, general readers.— Choice Reviews