Changes

|title=The Art of Noir

|sort=Art of Noir, The

|publisher=Overlook Duckworth

|date=November 2014

|summary=Forgetting a couple of tiny niggles, this is a perfect guide, for laymen and specialists, to a major side of American studio system cinema.

}}

Colour is surely not the first thing one associates with film noir – after all, the clue is in the name. ''The Third Man'' is only better with the shadows, Fritz Lang never needed gaudy colour, and the whole genre of noir would have been very different if it had been born in Technicolor. But it did live into the era of Cinemascope and colour pictures, and it was never advertised as black and white, as these superb images testify. The large postcards and posters that adorned American picturehouse lobbies to plug the films on offer were always lurid, vivid and extremely colourful. And this book is just as colourful – as well as erudite, comprehensive and extremely entertaining.