A Review of Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir
March 24, 2025
When I flipped open Eddie Muller’s revised and expanded edition of Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir, I thought I spotted a pretty large error: There were two chapters each devoted to six actresses.
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Obviously, I hadn’t read Muller’s 2001 edition of Dark City Dames. If I had, I’d have known that wasn’t an error but rather a very purposeful way of framing these stars' stories. In part one, Hollywood Midcentury, Muller details the backgrounds and careers through the 1950s of six noir icons: Jane Greer, Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, Evelyn Keyes, Coleen Gray, and Ann Savage. Part two, Hollywood Fin de Siècle (end of century), picks up with each lady fifty years in the future. Muller sets the scenes a half century later in poignant, wistful ways. It’s a captivating approach to their tales, and I really enjoyed how the first part framed their careers—all the similarities and differences—across the same 1940s-1950s era. (On the other hand, because I read the book slowly, by the time I got to part two, I misremembered—or conflated!—several stories from part one.)
Though I was well-aware of each actress before diving into Dark City Dames, I came in not knowing a whole lot about their personal lives or careers outside a handful of credits for each. Muller chose six women who were alive at the time he wrote this book 25 years ago, which explains why noir legends like Ida Lupino and Gloria Grahame were excluded. The in-depth interviews he conducted with each actress truly make the book. First, Muller is an excellent storyteller. I’ve long admired his writing, but Dark City Dames leans more on the personal stories, and he paints those in vivid, honest ways while always remaining respectful. Second, this allows the stars’ full personalities to shine through. From the firecracker that was Evelyn Keyes to the demure, self-critical Coleen Gray, the women Muller profiled were raw, reflective, and refreshing, and surely, that’s also an indication of how comfortable they must have felt opening up to him.
Eddie Muller at Noir City Hollywood 1999 with (from left to right): Ann Savage, Coleen Gray, Jane Greer, Evelyn Keyes, and Audrey Totter.
The new edition of Dark City Dames also includes ten shorter essays on “Eternal Flames” who impacted the world of noir. Muller “felt these ten had not gotten sufficient recognition,” which I heartily agree with. From Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt to Gail Russell and Peggie Castle, these women’s stories range from resilient to tragic and everything in between. Acquiring even a few pages’ worth of knowledge on them, many of whom I knew very little about, piqued my interest to discover more. (Heck, I even walked away learning something new about Marsha Hunt, the classic film actress I’ve personally written the most about!)
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Because I gained so much new and thoroughly eye-opening information from Dark City Dames, I thought it would be fun to highlight my biggest takeaways and surprises from each woman chronicled.
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Jane Greer
Jane Greer was quite the trouper. The accident she sustained in a Mexican swap while filming 1956’s Run for the Sun, which years later almost killed her, was something I knew nothing about. Her tenacity in picking up her life in the wake of this adversity, not to mention her husband leaving her with three boys not long before that, was moving.
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Audrey Totter
Audrey Totter played some of the darkest ladies of film noir—Tension (1950) anyone?—so discovering that she was the complete opposite in real life was a nice twist. I also never knew she almost appeared in The Killers (1946) but chose the bigger role offered, Lady in the Lake (1947), instead. She wondered—as did I—how starring in the former could have transformed her career.
Marie Windsor
Marie Windsor offered some of the biggest surprises, both personally and professionally. I can picture her growing up in a small once-bustling mining town in Utah and writing to her mother every day for 30 years. In Hollywood, I had no idea that The Narrow Margin (1952) was held for release for so long… and part of the reason was that Howard Hughes wanted to produce a new version with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell?! (Which never happened, of course.)
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Evelyn Keyes
Where do I even begin? First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever heard another classic film star as open as Keyes—when it comes to her shortcomings, her education, her lovers, her decision to live abroad, everything. (And now I really want to read her autobiography, Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister.) She sounded like such a vivacious personality, and, as Muller mentioned, quite the conversationalist, too. “I prefer to think that I’m continuing my evolution as a person,” she declared, as opposed to saying she was aging. That’s a saying I definitely am stealing.
Coleen Gray
Going from Keyes to Coleen Gray was quite the rollercoaster. Gray's politics and religion aside, I felt a connection to Gray personality-wise. Her reticence, her drive, and her constant attempts to learn (even enrolling in a grad-level art class at UCLA!) were elements of her life I strongly related to.
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Ann Savage
Ann Savage’s post-Hollywood life astonished me the most, maybe because she was really the only woman profiled in this book to fully step into a new career; she even rode the bus from Hollywood to Downtown LA—at least in her later years—to the law firm she worked at! Also, I very much hope that video exists of her surprise attendance at a 1983 screening of Detour (1945) at UCLA where it was mentioned that no one really knew what became of her and she exclaimed from the back of the theater, “I’m here!”
Joan Bennett
After listening to the season of Katrina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast on the Joan Bennett-Walter Wanger-Jennings Lang scandal, I learned quite a bit about the actress’ real life noir episode, which Muller dives into here. One thing I didn’t know about Bennett’s noir history? That she and husband Wanger were partners in Fritz Lang’s Diana Productions, named after the couple’s newborn daughter. (It didn’t last long, but still!)
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Peggie Castle
Peggie Castle is the actress I know the least about in this book. Her very short career and tragic life may have something to do with that; she passed away at age 45 after battling alcoholism. One interesting note was that she co-starred in her own TV series from 1959-1962 called Lawman.
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Rhonda Fleming
The fact that Eddie Muller said Rhonda Fleming “took herself off the roster of actresses intended for the original edition of Dark City Dames,” because she “insisted on sticking with this revisionist version of her life” instantly piqued my interest. I very much want to hear more about his conversation with her! (The “revisionist version” he alludes to was that she said she was married two times but in reality, that number was actually six. And I’m sure there’s probably more…)
Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt (both of whom are profiled in Dark City Dames) alongside Dennis O'Keefe in Raw Deal (1948).
Marsha Hunt
I know way too much about Marsha Hunt—and I’m not mad about it!—so for me, it was lovely to hear more about Muller’s experience working with her on his 2008 short film The Grand Inquisitor. Why did she agree to star in the movie? “To show them what they missed.” Cue the tears! (For those who don’t know, Hunt was blacklisted in the 1950s and never really got to play mature parts when she was older.)
Ella Raines
I’m only familiar with a few of Ella Raines’ noir roles, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. What I didn’t know was that producer Joan Harrison, who worked closely with Alfred Hitchcock before venturing out on her own as a producer, was Raines’ mentor. She also ended up starring in the short-lived 1954 TV show Janet Dean, Registered Nurse, which proved groundbreaking as it was the first medical series with a female lead.
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Ruth Roman
Many things about Ruth Roman’s life and career surprised me! First, that her parents owned a carnival sideshow when she was born. Second, how hard and long she toiled in making the rounds at casting offices in New York and Los Angeles before getting her break. Third, how ballsy she was to pitch Republic head Herb Yates a treatment she wrote—that became a fifteen-part serial, Zorro’s Black Whip. (She was paid $100. Yeah.)
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Gail Russell
Goodness, this is perhaps the most tragic story in the whole book. I knew Gail Russell turned to alcohol to calm her nerves, but I didn’t know that she wanted to be an artist and never had plans of being an actor. If two high school classmates hadn’t been hitchhiking and hadn’t told the Paramount executive who picked them up about her, her heartbreaking downward spiral might have been averted.
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Jan Sterling
I had no idea that Jan Sterling played in Born Yesterday on Broadway (taking over the role from Judy Holliday), and I never would have guessed her parents were New York socialites!
Claire Trevor
Claire Trevor is one of the actresses I’m most familiar with from this book—her noir and non-noir work. But the number of times Muller mentions her being nominated—and several times winning!—prestigious awards like Oscars and Emmys took me by surprise. I knew she was good, but I had no idea she was so highly recognized by the industry, because she it feels like she still flies relatively under the radar today.
Noir City Hollywood 2025 screened the extremely rare Helen Walker noir (directed by Mickey Rooney!) My True Story (1951).
Helen Walker
Unfortunately, Helen Walker is another of the devastating stories in this book. I don’t know too much about her work outside of Nightmare Alley (1947), which actually was released after the car accident that altered her life forever. But now I want to seek out some of her earlier work where she played lighter roles, before everything changed for her.
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The revised and updated edition of Dark City Dames is a beautiful book—in the stories, in the formatting, and in the pictures. I also appreciated Muller’s afterword, in which he details how the book came to be and some of his personal memories and impressions of each of the six main actresses he discussed. (I would 100% read a book just of these tales, especially the ones from Evelyn Keyes!)
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The window Muller provides into each of these women's stories gives the reader a fantastic sense of their personal and professional lives. I have a newfound appreciation for all of these stars in one way or another—and a long list of new films to check out!
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Thank you to Running Press for providing me with a review copy of Dark City Dames. The book will be released on April 8, 2025. You can pre-order a copy of the book HERE.
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