"This is what I crave in books about movies—an adventurous, constantly surprising and enlightening tour through under-appreciated aspects of film history, with a hugely knowledgeable, idiosyncratic, and opinionated guide. Chris D's passion for cinema transcends categories and boundaries, engaging with and embracing it all—as long as it's not boring! It's a film-feast that will nourish the soul of any devoted cinephile." – Eddie Muller , author of Dark City Dames, The Art of Noir , head of the Film Noir Foundation and host of Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies channel The sprawling The Humanity of Femmes Fatales and Heartless Villains compiles essays penned exclusively for this volume, looking into the hearts of the bad women and bad guys of the movies; a multitude of new chapters on Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, Jean Gabin, Robert Hossein, Anna Magnani, Carroll Baker, directors Claude Chabrol, Damiano Damiani, Elio Petri, Carlo Lizzani, Francesco Rossi, Fernando Di Leo, David Cronenberg, Alfred Hitchcock, John Cassavetes, Yasuzo Masumura, Hideo Gosha, Koji Wakamatsu, et. al. PLUS articles which have appeared in print and online, as well as two vintage interviews (w/ legendary filmmaker Sam Fuller from 1980 and cult icon Mary Woronov from 1979, both not seen since they originally appeared in Slash magazine over forty years ago) PLUS capsule reviews and critical lists examining character archetypes, gender roles, performers' mystiques/personas linked to their parts, visual style and narrative flow, genre tropes in film noir from the proto-noir 1930s, the so-called classic period (1940 - 1960), neo-noir (films in the noir style made since 1960), as well as other examples of dark cinema from international sources – including downbeat psychological dramas straying beyond genre boundaries, and heartbreaking tales of amour fou . The last 250 or so pages of this 828 page book feature selected annotated noir / neo-noir filmographies (some long, some short) from numerous countries, including the USA, UK/Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece, Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, Hong Kong/Taiwan/China, South Korea, Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, et. al.), Australia/New Zealand and more. “…an epic tome like The Humanity of Femmes Fatales and Heartless Villains: International Noir and Beyond Genre , which flits between subjects (actor and director filmographies and interviews) and time periods (‘40s noir, ‘60s and ‘70s French, Italian and Japanese crime, ‘80s and ‘90s psychosexual melodrama, millennial neo-noir) like a penetrating late-nite conversation. The text is not only sprawling but dense…sentences packed with maximum anecdotes and asides, and frequent editorial interjections that reinforce the sense of Chris giving you the lowdown in manic, real time. These pages are brimming with the bad and the beautiful. Ever the romantic, their author is bedeviled by his idée fixé , the concept of amour fou ; the phrase weaves through the book’s 800 pages like a warped metronome. Chris really wants someone to go crazy with, and this book is an open invitation.” – Kier-La Janisse , author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films” (2012/2022). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021)