The Art of Noir: The Posters and Graphics from the Classic Period of Film Noir »

Eddie Muller is the author of Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir and Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir. A noted film noir expert, he organizes and hosts the annual film noir festival at Los Angeles's premier film revival house, American Cinemateque, where he is the official programmer.

"The Art of Noir brilliantly showcases the most glorious noir posters from Hollywood and around the world. The films represented in the 338 arresting posters, lobby cards, and other promotional material range from such hard-boiled detective classics as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, to movies steeped in a brew of post-war cynicism, like The Killers, Night and the City, and Gun Crazy, to rare archive films such as The Devil Thumbs a Ride, Christmas Holiday, and They Made Me a Killer." Noir posters underwent some fascinating changes in foreign markets, as the art was adapted by local, classically trained artists - in most cases completely re-conceived - in brilliant rendering that not only capture the spirit of the films, but also highlight the graphic trends evolving worldwide over this rapidly developing period. For this book, noir expert Eddie Muller has assembled a striking lineup of posters, including many rare offerings, with the knockout graphics of Hollywood rounded out by the expansive Italian due- and quatro-folios woven with dark strands of lust and violence, the compact, brilliantly colored, highly saturated posters of Belgium, and the grimly expressionistic papier dunkel of Germany, darkly reflective of a nation reeling from war.

Publishers Weekly

Stanley Kubrick's The Killing touted as being "In All Its Fury and Violence...Like No Other Picture Since 'SCARFACE' and 'LITTLE CAESAR'!" Bay Area mystery writer Muller (his novel Shadow Boxer will be reviewed in the Dec. 9 issue of PW) describes the various styles employed by the studio system, all designed for, in the charming vernacular of theater owners, "putting asses in the seats"; the idiosyncratic promo for Sudden Fear has Joan Crawford staring luridly over a male figure's shoulder at a miniaturized Gloria Grahame embracing Jack Palance. With a clear love for and expertise in his subject matter, Muller tracks the evolution of the form through 275 posters (338 full-color illustrations in all), many of them full-page plates, which look nothing short of smashing in the book's oversize, 10 x 14 format. A series of foreign posters reveal how artists outside the studio system were able to convey a great deal of the films' psychological complexity in a single, giant image. The variety, style and color here, representing films familiar (The Postman Always Rings Twice) and forgotten (The Big Tip Off, starring Cathy Downs), will be enticing to any fan of noir or mid-century American history. (Dec. 3) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.