Allotment Wives: for Kay Francis lovers

In The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, founding noir critic Foster Hirsch opines that good noir is ruined when it becomes political and tries to bear a specific social message. Darkness, anxiety, corruption, crime, and inexorable fate are noir's territory,...

Pépé le Moko

The more I watch and study film noir, the deeper and more interesting the rabbit trail gets. There are so many loops and turns and connections to history, culture, politics, and artforms. I have been exploring the World War II...

Smash-Up…or Don’t

I came across Smash-up: The Story of a Woman (1947) while engaging in a combination of research on the Hollywood Blacklist and searching for new films to livetweet on Sunday evenings (via hashtag #BNoirDetour). To fill my HUAC research interests, I...