About the book
Bernie Dowling continues his award-winning series on film noir with exposés of its rebels and censors.
Beautiful Hedy Lamarr left the studio system that devalued her talent. Censorship and perfectionism derailed her career as an independent producer.
Anti-establishment content led to the infamous blacklisting of film noir artists, but it was a sexual dalliance with the nephew of a studio boss that got director Edgar G. Ulmer banished from the major studios.
Silent-film director Erich von Stroheim was banished just as the talkies began, because he exceeded his budget and added salacious content one time too many. He resumed acting and continued writing.
Ida Lupino was a brilliant noir actor who began her Hollywood career as a teenager and was suspended over the years for refusing inferior roles as an ingénue. Studio heads called her Loopy Lupino, but she turned in great performances in many noirs before becoming the first woman to direct a Hollywood noir.
For the first decade of his illustrious career, every film by Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa was censored: first by the wartime military expungers of Imperial Japan, then by the American occupation's military censors. Despite the censors looking over his shoulder, Kurosawa created a tough noir that stands as one of the greatest of them all: Stray Dog (1949).
