In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir by Robert Miklitsch
  • Peter Franklin
Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir. By Robert Miklitsch. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. ISBN: 081-354-8993. Paperback. Pp. xxii, 288. $32.95.

Compared to this poetic speech, the initial mano-a-mano exchange between Jeff and Stefanos is hard as the nails in a flat tire. … Like Dizzy Gillespie, who strategically underplayed in cutting contests with younger, less experienced but overly ambitious musicians, Jeff’s deadpan reply trumps his interlocutor’s ostensibly bright repartee.

(54)

Writing on mass-cultural forms like film or popular music is often dogged by the twin problems of style and readership: high academic theorizing can seem willfully to traduce such forms, while writing for the mass audience they actually address can appear trivializing or condescending. Academic publishers are often to blame, in their vaguely hopeful (if generally vain) assumption that people who watch mainstream films and listen to popular music might only read or purchase such books if they are written in an “undemanding” way that will not “put them off.” Robert Miklitsch embraces this complex and self-contradictory agenda with chaotic vengeance, inspired apparently by long undergraduate teaching experience. His approach seems to have pleased the editor he warmly thanks in his “Credits” (xxi) but whom we might prefer to blame for not helping him to solve the stylistic and structural problems of this fundamentally erudite and interesting book.

Perhaps the difficulties are doubled for a non-American reader, who might not grasp the book’s off-the-cuff, street-talk style, which seems often modeled upon the “hard-boiled” language of 1940s American noir gangsters and their “canaries” (female nightclub singers who may also be “sirens”). Elsewhere the writing shifts between the language of abstruse critical and psychoanalytic theory and what Miklitsch calls his “demotic” mode (xv), as if trying to wear jeans and T-shirt in an “approachable” way. Box-framed double-page inserts occasionally ape the style of a website; three-dimensional sentences attempt to name the joint authors of period popular songs in parenthetical inserts concerning the films in which those songs appear, all within straining sentences that started out addressing another film entirely. The following comes from a paragraph about Stuart Heisler’s The Glass Key and its “graphic depiction of physical violence” (178):

In fact, Lillian Randolph’s performance of the Jule Styne-Frank Loesser standard, “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You,” which was originally introduced [End Page 362] by Johnnie Johnston in the 1942 college “crime” musical Sweater Girl, can be said to deflect attention from the conventional heterosexual romance between Ed Beaumont (Ladd) and Janet Henry (Lake) to the rather more loaded, sadomasochistic relation between Ed and Jeff (William Bendix).

This book could have been made much more user-friendly by better use of footnoting and the inclusion of a filmography and a catalogue of cited diegetic songs, the latter including the names of songwriters and the films in which their songs were used. Miklitsch knows his noirs, and not only their language—he early expresses admiration for the chiseled “pulp poetry” (x) of late-period Raymond Chandler. He is also steeped in the 1940s journalism in which such films were celebrated and discussed and the memoirs of their actors and directors. He tries hard, but fails, to wear his knowledge and enthusiasm lightly; readers will be forewarned of the depth of Miklitsch’s familiarity with his subject when, in his “Credits,” he pays homage to friends who have shared with him their collections of “obscure and out-of-print film noirs” (xii). At his best Miklitsch can conjure a whole out-of-the-way film in a paragraph or two of intense visual, narrative, and sound-world evocation such that we feel we almost have seen (and heard) it; at his worst he produces prose whose surface noise of reference and cross-reference can disastrously obscure the big ideas that occasionally begin to emerge. All too quickly they are lost in the turbulent waves of description, parenthetical explanations of things we might not need to know, and the...

pdf

Share