"Film noir" evokes memories of stylish, cynical, black-and-white movies from the 1940s and '50s—melodramas about private eyes, femmes fatales, criminal gangs, and lovers on the run. James Naremore's prize-winning book discusses these pictures, but also shows that the central term is more complex and paradoxical than we realize. It treats noir as a term in criticism, as an expression of artistic modernism, as a symptom of Hollywood censorship and politics, as a market strategy, as an evolving style, and as an idea that circulates through all the media. This new and expanded edition of More Than Night contains an additional chapter on film noir in the twenty-first century.

James Naremore is Emeritus Chancellors' Professor of Communication and Culture, English, and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His books include Acting in the Cinema, The Magic World of Orson Welles, The Films of Vincente Minnelli, and On Kubrick.

"Original, thorough, and unprogrammatic research. . . . [Naremore] permits us to understand that film noir's iconographies and stylistics issue not from a single center of meaning, but a whole host of them."—Jonathan Lethem, Bookforum

"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."—Molly Haskell, Washington Post Book World

"Supplies the first study of film noir that achieves the sort of intellectual seriousness, depth of research, degree of critical insight, and level of writing that this group of films deserves."—Tom Gunning, Modernism and Modernity

First Prize Krasna-Krausz Moving-Image Book Awards; Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Awards Commendation, Society for Cinema Studies