| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sheri Chenin Biesen. Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 243. Cloth $50.00, paper $20.00.
Sheri Chenin Biesen wades into the murky, controversial world of film noir with a thoughtful monograph on the development of Hollywood's film noir in the 1940s. A film noir aficionado, Biesen provides the most detailed and thoroughly researched interpretation of this era's American film noir. The heart of her study is intensive analysis of the production histories of several key noir pictures.	1
She highlights the pivotal role of Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder for Paramount in 1943–1944, after being held on ice for nearly a decade by censorship concerns and studio timidity. Double Indemnity nicely illustrates Biesen's thesis that World War II, rather than retarding the development of American noir, was integral to it. As she writes: "The chiaroscuro lighting and shadowy visual design that today is considered so characteristic of film noir style was in large measure a savvy aesthetic response to the [Production] Code and the war" (p. 107). Biesen emphasizes that the motion picture industry's production code, though claiming to represent timeless aesthetic and moral criteria, was enforced more liberally in the 1940s and later. She also stresses the importance of the constraints the studios faced during World War II, when blackouts, shortages of material, and limited numbers of leading men demanded innovative responses.	. . .

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