Heads and Tales - Double Indemnity, James Cain, and Billy Wilder
JPROF
English - February 25, 2021 05:00 - 7 minutes - 5.22 MB - ★★★★★ - 1 ratingBooks Arts Education Self-Improvement baseball non-fiction beekeeping caricature comics drawing fiction stories writers writing Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Double Indemnity – the book by James Cain and the movie directed by Billy Wilder – defines, as well as anything, the elusive genré that we call noir.
Noir is generally associated with violence, usually murder, and sex, with conflicting motives and motivations, and with tragically flawed characters whose lives are never the happily contented ones they seek. In general, all of these aspects are played out in an urban setting, and much of the action occurs at night. Corruption, official or unofficial, is as inevitable as the darkness that pervades the characters and their environs.
text and drawings by Jim Stovall
In his forward to this book, Ed Caudill says:
"Jim Stovall writes in the introduction that he is “trying to caricature people.” He succeeds, perhaps ironically in light of the fact that writers themselves are inevitably – sometimes tragically, sometimes commendably, usually unintentionally – caricaturing culture. This collection careens along the gamut from rich and famous to downtrodden and obscure. Some of them, the readers will know. Others, I would take long odds, are unheard of among the perusers of this volume. There any number of lesser knowns whose names are fleeting but whose work is durable, whether in politics,
letters, sciences, or elsewhere. Some are masters of other media, such radio or cinema or illustration."
Jim Stovall is a former journalism professor who writes and draws obsessively and occasionally inflicts his work onto an unsuspecting and largely undeserving public.