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

Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2002. Hardcover. VG+. Light signs of sunning to spine, else clean and unmarked.. Quarto. Hardcover. Black cloth in illustrated jacket. 270 pages : color illustrations ; 37 cm. "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."--Jacket.