CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/13/2022

Moody melodrama in 'Film Noir Portraits'

Featured image—of Joan Crawford in her iconic 1945 come-back performance of ruthlessly ambitious yet heartlessly scorned single mother Mildred Pierce—is reproduced from Film Noir Portraits, Reel Art Press's authoritative new compendium of classic and previously unpublished film-noir studio photography. "These are the faces of men and women who had survived World War Two but had been permanently damaged or broken by the experience," Paul Duncan writes. "These are the faces of the desperate and the afraid, the smitten and the disgusted, the hardboiled and the furious, often writhing in pain after taking a punch or a bullet. These are the faces of noir."