x 343 pages, illustrated with black and white photos, and with notes on contributors. The back cover and the blank last three pages are lightly bumped at the head's outer edge, else the book is in excellent condition: clean, unmarked and solid. First edition. ""This bountiful anthology combines all the key early writings on film noir with many newer essays, including some published here for the first time. The collection is assembled by the editors of the Third Edition of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, now regarded as the standard work on the subject." (back cover) Divided into three sections: Seminal Essays; Case Studies; Noir Then and Now. CONTENTS: Towards a Definition of Film Noir / Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton; Noir Cinema / Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg Paint It Black: the Family Tree of the Film Noir / Raymond Durgnat Notes on Film Noir / Paul Schrader; nSome Visual Motifs of Film Noir / Janey Place and Lowell Peterson; No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir / Robert Porfirio; Film Noir: A Modest Proposal / James Damico; Out of What Past? Notes on the B film noir / Paul Kerr Phantom Lady, Cornell Woolrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic / Tony Williams; John Farrow: Anonymous Noir / Alain Silver and James Ursini; At the Margins of Film Noir: Preminger's Angel Face / Richard Lippe; The Killers: Expressiveness of Sound and Image in Film Noir / Robert Porfirio; Mann in the Dark: the Films Noir of Anthony Mann / Robert E. Smith;Expressionist Doom in Night and the City / Glenn Erickson; Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style / Alain Silver.; The Post-Noir P.I.: The Long Goodbye and Hickey and Boggs / Elizabeth Ward; Film Noir, Voice-over, and the Femme Fatale / Karen Hollinger; What is This Called Noir? / Alain Silver and Linda Brookover; Angst at Sixty Fields per Second / James Ursini Miami Vice, The Legacy of Film Noir / Jeremy G. Butler Kill Me Again: Movement becomes Genre / Todd Erickson Son of Noir: Neo-Film Noir and the Neo-B Picture / Alain Silver.