BOOK 221: THE DARK GALLERIES: A MUSEUM GUIDE TO PAINTED PORTRAITS IN FILM NOIR, GOTHIC MELODRAMAS AND GHOST STORIES OF THE 1940S AND 1950S : STEVEN JACOBS & LISA COLPAERT
BOOK 221: THE DARK GALLERIES: A MUSEUM GUIDE TO PAINTED PORTRAITS IN FILM NOIR, GOTHIC MELODRAMAS AND GHOST STORIES OF THE 1940S AND 1950S : STEVEN JACOBS & LISA COLPAERT
With this post I’ve decided to make it a bit like the post I did with the Patti Smith book M Train
As there were a lot of references there I’ve included all the ones I could, as an exercise for me to look up all the information I could learn on the things referenced. This was a bit easier – I’ve just listed all the films mentioned in this book with links to where to find them.
Imagine a museum in which the portrait of Carlotta Valdes, an important prop in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, hangs on a wall next to the painted portrait of the title character of Otto Preminger's Laura, opposite the portraits of the desired or murdered women in Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, George Cukor's Gaslight and Nicholas Ray's Born to Be Bad. In an adjacent gallery, the visitor of this imaginary museum can contemplate the portraits of patriarchs that feature in films such as House of Strangers, Suspicion, Gilda and Strangers on a Train. This is precisely the concept of this book. The Dark Galleries looks at American (and some British) films of the 1940s and 1950s, in which a painted portrait plays an important part in the plot. Presented as a guide to an imaginary museum, this book includes more than 80 entries on the artistic and cinematic aspects of these portraits.
(text from Goodreads.com)
MY VERDICT: I loved this book, it looks great, the essay is interesting and not overly academic and the films recommended are varied and interesting. And there’s a section where they list films based on whether they’re based on artists or paintings ect. I love art and I love film noir and so this was great for me and now I’ve got a lot more films recommended for me to watch. The ones I have watched so far have been great.
Click on the image to be taken to where you can see each film.
