AFTER-AFTERWORD: From a subsequent conversation related to this topic, an additional film not discussed in 1998 and omitted from the 2021 edition was identified--and it's quite surprising given its prominence during the first decade of the NC efforts. What film is that? It's DECOY (1946), the legendary over-the-top Monogram release that was a featured "showstopper" in the 2000 noir festival held in Los Angeles prior to the formal kickoff of the NC series. The film was screened twice at NC SF: first at NC #2 in 2004, and again at NC #4 in 2006. DECOY was considered a major find at the time, and was part of an early Warner Brothers film noir set. But over the intervening years, DECOY receded in recognition, possibly due to the strange, "science-fictiony" sequence where a gangster is raised from the dead in order that the arch-villainess (or is that the "arch" villainess) Margot Shelby can betray him once they've found his stash of loot from a bank robbery. Jake Hinkson wrote an essay about the marriage of lead actress Jean Gillie and director Jack Bernhard in a later edition of the NC e-zine (around 2015, IIRC), and Eddie mentions Bernhard in the context of his other notable noir (1948's THE HUNTED) as part of his added sidebar about Belita (cribbed from an essay he wrote for the NC e-zine under the "earlier regime"), but since then DECOY has clearly slipped back into obscurity. Only Eddie knows why he didn't bother to mention it in DARK CITY 2, as the film does fit into the lurid extremity that he clearly favored in the book's original text. Since the FNF didn't have a hand in restoring it, and since it is a film with a very odd tone (as you'll sense from reading Edgar Chaput's two takes at describing it--links at bottom), it could simply be that it didn't/doesn't serve any purpose in the repositioning of the DARK CITY text (as discussed above). Or maybe it was just a brain cramp. Whatever the reason, it remains a surprising omission, given how much play the film received when it was first rediscovered. https://www.popoptiq.com/friday-noir-for-good-or-ill-decoy-is-not-a-typical-noir/ http://cutprintfilm.com/features/columns/friday-noir/friday-noir-decoy/
on 8/3/2021, 12:05 pm
It was clear even before the new version was officially available that the approach taken in 1998 was not going to change significantly: there's that thing about leopards and spots. The essential additions to the "revised and expanded" second edition are a lot more pictures and two new chapters, one covering what we've come to call "newspaper noir" (a sub-type that only resurfaced in the early years of the NC e-zine, then turned into a "headline act" at NC 7 in 2009) and the other covering "prison noir," which permitted a look back at a number of 30s films that most would argue against including in the actual noir canon, but did address a sub-type that had been mostly overlooked in the first edition.
The total number of films added to DARK CITY 2 is 119 (approximately: I had only a couple of hours free, so moved quickly to capture this info, thus it's likely that the count is off a bit). It will be clear from the breakdown of the newly added titles by chapter where the lions' share came from (and, of course, which are the new chapters):
WELCOME TO DARK CITY--5
SINISTER HEIGHTS--2
THE PRECINCT--3
HATE STREET--9
THE CITY DESK--24
SHAMUS FLATS--3
VIXENVILLE--2
BLIND ALLEY--12
THE PSYCH WARD--1
KNOCKOVER SQUARE--12
LOSER'S LANE--4
THE BIG HOUSE--30
THIEVES' HIGHWAY--1
THE STAGE DOOR--4
AFTERWORD--6
(Remember these are newly added titles, and not the total number of titles covered in each chapter.)
That total comes to 118, not 119; as noted, this was a quick-and-dirty collation, since the level of detail provided for the vast majority of the films (and particularly for those added to the new edition) is extremely sparse. In fact, of the 119 titles added, almost exactly half of them are simply a reference to the title itself, with no other analysis. (These are often compilations of a director's output, but sometimes a compilation of a producer or an actors' noir filmography.)
The original edition of DARK CITY contained lists of this type, but they were not nearly so prominent as what the reader will encounter in DARK CITY 2. Each reader will have to decide for themselves how "sore-thumb-like" such a profusion of lists seem to be as they navigate the text; the most immediate impact is that it exposes the difference in writing tone that now oscillates through the book, with stretches of historical exposition grafted between the hard-boiled set-pieces that dominated the 1998 edition. For some, that juxtaposition may be jarring; for others, it may provide a needed respite from the stylistic excesses that have been left primarily untouched by the author.
The bulk of the added page count does not come from an expansion of detailed discussion of films; it comes from the two new chapters, which supply approximately 35 additional pages, and from roughly a dozen new sidebars discussing significant figures in noir. Some of this is completely new material (mostly recycled from essays published in the NC e-zine), while others are portions of the first edition text that have been separated for emphasis. Occasionally these are only a page in length; most cover two pages, though Gloria Grahame, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan and Joan Crawford receive three pages each.
The contributors to noir who get the most "short shrift" in DARK CITY are the writers and the character actors. The original edition focused on the "big five" of hardboiled fiction--Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Woolrich and Burnett--and that material is left intact; there is a sidebar devoted to Ben Hecht, which makes good sense given his unique association with noir--but references to other writers are few and far between, mostly filler info provided for films that are considered to be in the top echelon. (Eddie might suggest that Philippe Garnier's book on writers in Hollywood covered that topic, but instead of referencing the whole of that book--recently translated and published by Eddie's in-house press--he only focuses on the "colorful criminous characters" who went from time in stir to writing movie scripts...another facet of his inordinate desire to emphasize the lurid and make good on his "barroom, not classroom" admonition. The problem is that those writers are from the 30s and are not part of the "noir movement" the book is chronicling; the writers who struggled to exist in the actual "noir era" are marginalized as a result, a highly ironic result from someone whose primary aim was to be a crime novelist and famously pronounced "it's always the writers who get screwed.")
Character actors might as well not exist in either edition of DARK CITY, and yet they supply so much of the "dirt under the fingernails" aspect of film noir that the human balance of the entire book is thrown off as a result. (There is more material about real-life gangsters and their peripheral association with film noir than there is discussion of character actors and their contribution to noir.)
Finally: foreign noir. For a man who spent 2020 pushing films made outside the US, the new edition of DARK CITY is almost as totally bereft of the international noir phenomenon as its predecessor. The corporate hat is donned in the afterword to showcase the FNF's work in restoring a handful of Argentine noirs, but they are simply part of the 60 or so films whose names merely appear in the book without any accompanying detail. It seems that Eddie is careful to only reference foreign noirs that were made during the still-accepted time frame that ostensibly defines the "noir era" (1940-59); following up on his most recent festival, where a sizable portion of the foreign films screened were from the 1960s, would be problematic for updating a book that is still aimed at compartmentalizing noir into a mode of American exceptionalism.
The major goal in the upgrade of DARK CITY was to pad the numbers--with a larger audience to tap, one primarily weaned on Noir Alley, the second edition was clearly positioned to add heft to a book that was behind the curve in terms of the noir canon even as it was known to many in 1998. The 120 or so added titles--even if half of them simply appear as part of a film list--are the most cannily efficient way to convince the target audience that the book is as comprehensive and authoritative as anyone in the mass marketplace could want.
What we are witnessing here is a "ca-ching" moment, not an "ah-ha" moment. While it's good on Eddie that he will now be in an even stronger position to do the "drinks on me" routine in the barroom, it's not so good for those who are beginning to see just how much more work in the classroom is needed to really understand and appreciate the full range (and worldwide reach) of film noir.
AFTERWORD: Odd to note that the 1998 edition of DARK CITY omitted some films that are shocking to contemplate now (and, to some extent, back at that time as well). Take a look at the list of films not mentioned in the first edition:
ACE IN THE HOLE
THE BIG CLOCK
CRY OF THE CITY
THE DAMNED DON'T CRY
DARK PASSAGE
KEY LARGO
NORA PRENTISS
POSSESSED
SUNSET BOULEVARD
SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
That's quite a little film festival that went AWOL in 1998--hell, I had laser disks for a bunch of these films in the late 1980s! Needless to say, they are all in the second edition. But you're on your own to discover what American films that ought to at least be in one of those "listicles" that are found in various locations amidst the text are still not to be found in DARK CITY...