Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America’s Dark Art

Class, Crime and International Film Noir argues that this dark, seedy variant of the crime film was a global phenomenon from its inception. Dennis Broe locates noir’s beginnings not in the Hollywood post-war B film, but rather in the late poetic realist works in France while the Foreword by Kees van der Pijl, author of The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, supplies a context for the wider political economic background of the films studied.

With judicious comparisons to the rise of noir in Hollywood, Dennis Broe details the development of parallel noir strands in France, Britain, Italy, and Japan: he describes how a global political and social situation, similarities in studio mode of production, and genre commonalties gave rise to a form artists employed to express discontent at the failure of a new world to materialize in the wake of the Second World War. Besides being a detailed analysis of global noir, the book is also an auteur study of more neglected works by directors such as Renoir, Antonioni, Rosi, Kurosawa, and Mizoguchi.