European Film Noir

I just finished an interesting collection of essays and articles called European Film Noir. The book was released early this year, and it was published by Manchester University Press and edited by Andrew Spicer, who seems to have written a whole book about the whole thing (simply called Film Noir, 2002). The book is quite academic, but I didn't mind (well, maybe at times, especially in the section about the Italian film noir).

The book has nine articles on five countries and their film noir traditions: France, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Italy. The films depicted in the book seem all quite interesting, but it seems also that some of them are deemed to be pretty obscure and not easily to be seen, even on DVD. Some of these are for example the French rendition of Leo Malet's 120, rue de la Gare from 1946, with P.I. Nestor Burma, and Carlos Saura's debut film, Los golfos (1960), which was made with a very limited budget.

I wrote a review of the book for Ruumiin kulttuuri, the Finnish Whodunnit Society's magazine, but it turned out to be too long, so I posted the original version here and will edit the print version. It's in Finnish.