It is fitting that film noir, a genre shrouded in dark suspense, in many ways owes its existence to two loners who linked their talents and created Hollywood movie history. The film noir genre has entertained worldwide audiences for three generations.A slender, restless young man left his Los Angeles roots to find his identity elsewhere. Ultimately settling in Missouri, he was unable to secure anything resembling stability, moving from one job to another. He was periodically fired ...

Revised and updated with 25 new essays, the fourth edition of this bestselling collection brings together more than 30 leaders in the field of educational theory. An engaging exploration of the ideas and trends shaping education in today’s classrooms, Philosophy of Education includes topics on high-stakes testing, consumerism in education, and social justice issues in the classroom. How can we teach students moral values while avoiding indoctrination? How should a teacher deal with controv...

Origins of Film Noir takes readers on a journey exploring the early steps in the development of an exciting new genre. During the difficult days of the Great Depression of the thirties people found an escape from the realities of their own trials through reading detective fiction in popular magazines such as Black Mask. From there it was just a brief period before two famous detective authors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, saw their work transported to the large and quickly popula...

Few movie stars made as great an impact as Marilyn Monroe. Although she died in 1962, a half century later she remains vivid in popular culture, even to those who have never seen her films. Two of the men she married, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, themselves made a powerful cultural impact.In this moving essay, David Morrell analyses Monroe's poignant life, which had more significance than any movie in which she appeared. Even her most knowledgeable fans will find something new i...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. and Fosse comes the revelatory account of the making of a modern American masterpieceChinatown is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. Its twist ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue the most haunting. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making.In Sam Wasson's telling, it becomes the defining s...

With a new epilogue updated from its hardcover edition titled Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family"Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home, and without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy ...

"Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home and, without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our mi...

From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who’s always played by his own rules.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and ...

Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wonder Woman, the Avengers, the X-Men, Watchmen, and more: the companion volume to the PBS documentary series of the same name that tells the story of the superhero in American popular culture.Together again for the first time, here come the greatest comic book superheroes ever assembled between two covers: down from the heavens—Superman and the Mighty Thor—or swinging over rooftops—the Batman and Spider-Man; star-spangled, l...

A revised and updated edition of the definitive study of the most original genre of American cinema.Foster Hirsch's The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir is by far the most thorough and entertaining study of the themes, visual motifs, character types, actors, directors, and films in this genre ever published. From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes o...

From one of the most admired critics of our time, brilliant insights into the act of watching movies and an enlightening discussion about how to derive more from any film experience.Since first publishing his landmark Biographical Dictionary of Film in 1975 (recently released in its sixth edition), David Thomson has been one of our most provocative authorities on all things cinema. Now he offers his most inventive exploration of the medium yet: guiding us through each elem...

With the advent of the Second World War a new mood was discernible in film drama - an atmosphere of disillusion and a sense of foreboding, a dark quality that derived as much from the characters depicted as from the cinematographer's art. These films, among them such classics as Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window, Touch of Evil and sunset Boulevard, emerged retrospectively as a genre in themselves when a French film critic referred to them collectively as film noir.Bruce Cro...