In this richly detailed study, James Naremore focuses on the work of film acting, showing what players contribute to movies. Ranging from the earliest short subjects of Charles Chaplin to the contemporary features of Robert DeNiro, he develops a useful means of analyzing performance in the age of mechanical reproduction; at the same time, he reveals the ideological implications behind various approaches to acting, and suggests ways that behavior on the screen can be linked to the presentation of self in society.

Naremore's discussion of such figures as Lillian Gish, Marlene Dietrich, James Cagney, and Cary Grant will interest the specialist and the general reader alike, helping to establish standards and methods for future writing about performers and their craft.

James Naremore is director of the film studies program at Indiana University.

"Quite simply the best, most comprehensive book available on film noir, period. The book broadens our understanding of the antecedents of the noir sensibility, clarifies the various cinematic threads of noir style, grounds noir films historically, and extends the idea of noir into current non-film media. In doing all of this Naremore's book straightens out much of the current confusion that continues to dog the criticism about film noir. . . . Quite simply, James Naremore's ground-breaking More than Night is an indispensable source for any future work on film noir."—Hitchcock Annual

"Mr. Naremore concentrates on seven stars from Chaplin to DeNiro, and his comments are illuminating and passionately true."—Films in Review

"A text on movie acting to be read with a handy VCR and cassettes stacked at your side. . . . Quite admirable detail."—Kirkus Reviews

"Brilliantly grounded. . . . More than Night is structured like Kurosawa’s Rashomon, as a series of views onto aspects of an impossible, elusive story. . . . Naremore permits us to understand that film noir’s iconographies and stylistics exist to be appropriated endlesly (and too often hollowly) by advertising and "high art" alike because they continually and energetically issue not from a single center of meaning, but a whole host of them."—Bookforum

"Emulating the very quality he finds at the heart of noir culture, James Naremore, in his richly informative and eminently readable study, More Than Night, creates a bridge between the discursive aridty of high theory . . . and . . . moist fandom. . . . Provides a useful and often highly original supplement for both the casual student and hopelessly addicted zealot."—Cineaste

"Naremore, one of our most perceptive and complete film scholars, looks into the many cultural tributaries feeding into noir and provides fresh insights into the films themselves."—Washington Post



"Naremore supplies the first study of film noir that achieves he sort of intellectual seriousness, depth of research, degree of critical insight, and level of writing that this group of film deserves."—Modernism/Modernity

"More than Night itself stages a reinvigoration of noir criticism that sets new agendas for historical and critical investigation."—Screening the Past

"Each chapter is richly informed about the films and their various cultural intersections, so the reader has the sense of participating in a fascinating discussion that refuses the temptation of closure and eventually stops without concluding. If Naremore's book is, like the concept it describes, a bit of a baggy monster, it is well worth the encounter."—Choice