this most modern of the media, whose possibilities fascinated Brecht and Benjamin and not much later gener­ ated the lugubrious Adorno-Horkheimer vision of the 'culture industry'

Rather than struggling with a depression, the post-war era lived in fear of one, wrestling with a shadow all the more minatory because it obstinately remained a shadow, a phantasm, not a state of affairs.

The claustral New York of Otto Preminger's 1 944 film noir of Vera Caspary's novel Laura feels somehow subaqueous, 'more submarine than subterranean', as Benjamin said of Baudelaire's Paris, and on the point of abandonment.

But then, Woolrich's portrait of urban abandonment and desolation is not merely film noir atmospherics avant la lettre. It is a veridical picture of New York still deeply scarred by the Depression