Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir
Penzler Pick,August  2001:Two years ago, I wrote a book titled101 Greatest Films of Mystery and  Suspense. In addition to watching every one of those movies again (not  exactly a horrendous ordeal), I did tons of research, flipping through or  reading more than a hundred books about film. The best book--the one with the  most offbeat stories and anecdotes, the most accurate information, and the most  entertainingly written--wasDark  Cityby Eddie Muller. It was a fascinating study of the great films  noir, and a page didn't go by without my learning something.Now Muller is back withDark City Dames. It's a very different kind of  book, not offering the big-picture overview thatDark Citydid, but it's  nearly as fascinating. It's a portrait of six of the greatest femme fatales of  the wonderful black-and-white crime movies that filled the screens in the 1940s  and '50s: Jane Greer (the star, with Robert Mitchum, ofOut of the PastandThe Big Steal), Marie Windsor (The Killing,The Narrow  Margin), Ann Savage (Detour), Evelyn Keyes (The Prowler,Johnny O'Clock), Audrey Totter (The Lady in the Lake,The  Unsuspected), and Coleen Gray (The Sleeping City,Kiss of  Death,Nightmare Alley).But these aren't rehashes of plots and quotes from the rave reviews of these  stars. Muller personally interviewed each of them, and the second half of the  book is a kind of "Where are they now?" Perhaps oddly--perhaps not--these  wicked, lying, cheating, double-crossing, money-hungry temptresses of the screen  turn out to be rather nice ladies, as normal as one could expect of beautiful  movie stars, and Muller brings them fully to life.There are regrets here, both on the part of the reader and of Muller, that space  couldn't be devoted to many of the biggest female stars of film noir. There's no  Barbara Stanwyck, or Gloria Grahame, or Veronica Lake, or Lisabeth Scott, or  Claire Trevor, or Ida Lupino. Scott became a silent recluse, and the others had  died. But that is only in real life. On the screen they will live forever, just  as they do in Muller's marvelous love letter to them all.--Otto Penzler