The cover story has about 2500 words (not counting what might be the most far-fetched sidebar in the e-zine's history) and is stretched to cover ten pages via the use of several full-page photos. Aside from any production design strategy, the reason for this will be clear to most seasoned followers of film noir: William Holden's noir filmography is simply too meagre to credibly support such positioning. (Shaky ground becomes apparent when the photos selected for "noir impact" feature images from Holden's first and least successful noir entry, THE DARK PAST.)
William Holden overdoes it in THE DARK PAST
Frustratingly, author Rachel Walther seems intent on racing through the films rather than expanding on the nuances within Holden's performances (which might have led her to the self-loathing that was the underlying feature of Holden's own personality, a trait that consistently animates his best work).*
Similar strategies are employed to somewhat less egregious effect in the articles that follow, including a rather puffy piece from Imogen Smith, which wavers from its initial focus on the two noirs from Roman Viñholy Barreto (THE BEAST MUST DIE and THE BLACK VAMPIRE) to name-check the other 4-to-5 Argentinian noirs that have been recycled in the FNF playlist for the past seven years. (We seem to wait in vain for any additional rediscoveries from Argentine directors.) While this essay features Smith's ever-elegant style, its cheerleading aspect does become a bit too obvious in places--which is likely why the editors exercised some restraint in not making it the cover story.
Ben Sassone's piece on noir in the Saturday Evening Post, a very fine idea for an essay on the serialization of noir-era crime fiction, clearly needed a rewrite and additional image collection that no one seemed willing to undertake, so it is the one essay in the e-zine that is much, much shorter than it should have been, representing a wasted opportunity for an essay that could have actually sustained 10-14 pages in the e-zine.
All in all, the trends on display in this issue strongly indicate that the magazine continues to move further away from actual analysis of noir into a mode where it features stars and directors in relatively superficial surveys, making it less and less distinguishable from other film publications. In doing so, it now appears to be banking on a revised approach to production design and the prospect of selling of its hard-copy version via the color imagery available to it as the publication's real calling card for the future.
It's possible that if the hard-copy edition sales can be steady enough, issues of this type might be sufficiently successful to permit the retirement of the NC Annual, which has never reproduced the color imagery from the e-zine and could become less desirable to consumers as a result of a comparison with the hard-copy e-zine. The $14.99 price tag for hard-copy may not be sustainable over the long run, however--but the content of this issue strongly suggest that the hope is that flashier, more "in-your-face" production design can be a catalyst to keep folks paying more than twice the dollar amount for the material that used to be collected in a $25 paperback.
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*For example, a longer, more valuable essay could have been written focusing solely on THE TURNING POINT, a still undervalued noir only recently rescued from oblivion, a film that features a complex, highly nuanced performance from Holden. Walther races through the film's plot, looking to sum up the similarities between Holden's character and those in other (often non-noir) films, ultimately failing to advocate for the film itself, which deserves to be lifted out of the long shadow cast by SUNSET BOULEVARD.)
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