Shrouded in suspicion, racked with cynicism and tortured by doomed love, in the 1940s and 50s Hollywood revealed its dark side in a wave of films that were dubbed 'film noir' by French critics, both for their heavy use of shade and for their black outlook.<BR>Film Noir looks at the defining movies made in this brooding, menacing tone, covering such classics as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, The Killers and Kiss Me Deadly, and analyses film noir's typical use of expressionistic lighting, deep focus camera work and disorientating visual schemes.<BR>As well as discussing plot and structure in detail, the book profiles iconic actors such as Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past and The Night of the Hunter, legendary directors like Billy Wilder, Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, and writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain on whose work many of the films were based.