In mid-October 2013 the publisher Limelight released my book A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir: The Essential Reference Guide
. The book has entries on well over 3,000 films noirs and related movies from all over the world, including over 2,000 from the US alone.
The purpose of Noirish is to act as an extension to the Encyclopedia -- an annex, if you like -- where I can add entries for movies that for one reason or another didn't make it into the printed book.
In some instances, this is just because the movie concerned was released too late for inclusion.
Most often, though, the reason was logistic. Although the Encyclopedia takes the broadest possible view of film noir, there were some movies that were either too obscure or too tangential to the theme to merit the use of precious page space: 800+ large-format pages -- nearly 700,000 words -- may seem a lot but, when you're trying to cover in excess of 3,000 movies, you soon learn to appreciate the constraints.
That's why this enterprise has the title it has: Noirish. Many of the movies here are very borderline noir, and some aren't noir at all but have associational interest.
Just because a movie's obscure doesn't mean it's lousy . . . although there'll be some lousy movies covered here. There'll also be plenty of movies that are, shall we say, undistinguished -- which is not to say they're without at least some points of interest, and certainly isn't to say they're not lots of fun to watch.
After posting a bunch of entries to get myself started, I'll be adding new movies to Noirish as and when I watch them.
Noirish