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Title: Film Noir Reader
Review: I give this book two stars instead of one because it fills a gap in my film noir book collection, but I have to say it has dated badly. I bought because I loved Alain Silver's book Noir Style, which is a collection of black-and-white stills from film noir classics, with marvelous commentary. But the Film Noir Reader opens with a collection of essays from the 1970s that display everything bad about the 70s, academic, pretentious, pompous, over-anxious to establish a high-brow status for a low-brow art form (at least it was then). In the 2nd and 3rd sections, the "up-to-date" essays, we get, for instance, an analysis of the TV show Miami Vice in terms of its film noir elements... Miami Vice???
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