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| BearManor Media (June 2023). |
“Nailing down a coffin lid is far easier than nailing down a universally agreed upon definition of the term film noir.” – Robert Strom
Every so often a book comes along that somehow manages to evoke our childhood and our love of films at the same time. Robert Strom’s Cries in the Night: Children in Film Noir is just such a book.
I grew up in a place I used to call Shadowland, a quiet suburb of Toronto known officially as Don Mills (the first formally designed suburb in North America) where there wasn’t much to do but listen to music and watch movies. Luckily I was also a kid in the 1960’s, a time when the best of both of those pursuits was available to us in abundance. When I was about ten years old my life was changed forever by a secret practice I used to engage in when the rest of my relatively normal suburban family was fast asleep at night. Back in those days, after midnight the public broadcasting system in Canada used to transmit overnight classic movies across the airwaves and into our homes, and I would quietly go out into our dark living room, turn on the television and start watching old films long into the wee wee hours. That was my initial and probably too young exposure to dark movies I would never have been allowed to watch in theatres or during the daylight.