It started out as a kind of joke, and then it wasn’t funny anymore because money became involved. Deep down, nothing about money is funny.
– Charles Willeford (2000: 3)
With thanks to Susan Alexander, Caroline Bainbridge, Emma Bircham, Anita Biressi, Andrew M. Butler, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Graham Fraser, Carl Freedman, Gillian Glitre, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, Iris Luppa, China Miéville, Heather Nunn, Mike Sanders, Greg Tuck, friends and colleagues at BCUC and Historical Materialism, my family and, above all, Kathrina Glitre – their friendship, solicitude and kindnesses made the year before I wrote this book easier to bear. Additional thanks to Iris for helpful comments on Weimar cinema; Carl for his Walter Neff secret; Mike Harrison for ‘Fat Michael Douglas, every woman’s dream’; and Kathrina for making this a better book than it would otherwise have been. Thanks also, of course, to Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Ida Lupino, Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, Robert Ryan, Barbara Stanwyck, Claire Trevor, Richard Widmark…