Crime Scenes: Movie Poster Art of the Film Noir: The Classic Period, 1941-1959

by Lawrence Bassoff

Book Overview

Crime novelists, movie stars and filmmakers have together created a shadowy celluloid underworld of desperate characters, violent passions and illicit schemes, dubbed by the French film noir (black... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1886310114
• ISBN13: 9781886310117
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Lawrence Bassoff Collection
• Length: 159 Pages
• Weight: 2.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 11.0" x 14.1"

Customer Reviews

Film Noir brought to life through colorful posters

This is an outstanding collection of film noir posters & is well-written. It starts out with an informative interview with the great director Robert Wise (Born to Kill, The Set-Up) & then has a brief section explaining exactly what film noir means. It has a great section on the antecedents of film noir: detective & crime novels, gangster films, German Expressionism, & Italian Neo-Realism. Next is my favorite part of the book: the "rogues gallery" of fifty film noir stars & their movie roles in the genre. I've turned to this section countless times when doing research, although I wonder why actors like Linda Darnell were included while well-known actors like Sterling Hayden (the Killing, the Asphalt Jungle, Naked Alibi) were left off. Finally, the book covers 36 famous film noirs & the posters of each movie. It includes the typical price range for the posters so this will be very helpful to collectors. Sadly this book has gone out-of-print but you should definitely look for a copy. It's a definite must-have for any serious film noir fan.

he's my cousin

he's my cousin, so of course i thought this book was good.

You can open the book, and look inside of it

there excactly 193 Movie posters and Lobby cards describe inside this book, you can open it in MOVIE POSTER@BOOK DATABASE to have more informations on it

Superb collection of film poster art

With the growth of interest in film posters and a subsequent similar growth in books on the subject, this book stands head and shoulders above most of the competition. Unlike similar books which are simply hodge-podge collections of poster images, Lawrence Bassoff has created a book that is nearly as much fun to read as it is to look at.Although lightweight on text, there is no padding in this book. The comments on the films themselves are incisive and knowing. By featuring posters from various countries, Bassoff allows the reader to see how different films have been sold in different countries. Part nostalgia trip, part reference work, part cinema graphics history and wholly entertaining, CRIME SCENES adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. After Bassoff's first book on the film posters for Errol Flynn films, CRIME SCENES can only make one wonder: what next from a such an obvious expert in the field? I loved it!