The American film noir, the popular genre that focused on urban crime and corruption in the 1940s and 1950s, exhibits the greatest amount of narrative experimentation in the modern American cinema. Spurred by postwar disillusionment, cold war anxieties, and changing social circumstances, these films revealed the dark side of American life and, in doing so, created unique narrative structures in order to speak of that darkness 

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
ISBN: 9780252060564. 248 pp.
Softcover. Very good.