“It was infamously racially exclusive. W.C. Handy wished to go one evening to the Cotton Club and he was turned away. And he could hear his music being performed!” – Levering Lewis, historian It was the greatest nightclub of its day and there’s a convincing argument to be made that it was the greatest nightclub that…
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct,…
In the Supreme Court ruling of Jacobellis vs. Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart wrote regarding obscenity that “he knew it when he saw it.” That’s a good benchmark for a lot of things, but it works particularly well for noir. The Encyclopedia Britannica had this to say about film noir: Film noir, (French: “dark film”) style…
“A pulp story without a detective and, obviously, somebody for him to do battle with is unthinkable, and I can’t remember reading a pulp story that didn’t have a dame – either a good girl or a bad girl.” – Otto Penzler The 1890’s in Europe was, for all intents and purposes, a golden age…
“It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night.” –Willie Sutton-Bank Robber William Francis “Willie” Sutton Jr. was born on June 30th, 1901 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a poor tenement neighborhood known at the time as Irishtown. He was the son of a blacksmith and the fourth of five children. His…
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