The Kent Memorial Library in Suffield CT will begin a film noir series this week:

February 27 6.30pm: Out Of The Past Jacques Tourneur’s classic tells the typical film noir story: A man lets his weaknesses run away with him in the face of financial hardship and a beautiful, untrustworthy woman.
Out Of The Past (1947) - Tourneur’s Mise En Scene
Out Of The Past (1947) - Tourneur’s Mise En Scene Revisited

March 5 2pm, 7pm: The Maltese Falcon John Huston’s 1941 directorial debut, a classic of obsession, starring Humphrey Bogart. It also will be shown at 2 p.m. that day. 101 minutes.

March 12 6.30pm: Dark Passage Delmer Daves’ 1947 classic, starring Bogart and Lauren Bacall, about a wrongly convicted man. 106 minutes.

March 26 6.30pm: The Underneath Stephen Soderbergh’s neo-noir from 1995, starring Peter Gallagher, about an armored-car heist. R. 99 minutes.

April 2 6.30pm: Elevator to the Gallows Louis Malle’s 1958 noir starring Jeanne Moreau, about a murder that sets off a chain of events. French with subtitles. 88 minutes.

Full details

More classic noir movies to catch ad-free on Australia’s ABC HD Digital TV over the next fortnight:

The Locket (1946)
4:30am Friday, 22 Feb 2008
A psychiatrist tries to prevent a disturbed woman’s marriage. CAST: Robert Mitchum, Laraine Day, Brian Aherne, Gene Raymond DIR: John Brahm

Born To Be Bad (1950)
1:10am Monday, 25 Feb 2008
A scheming woman marries for money, but continues her affair with an idealistic writer. CAST: Joan Fontaine, Robert Ryan, Zachary Scott, Joan Leslie, Mel Ferrer, Harold Vermilyea DIR: Nicholas Ray

Val Lewton Double-Feature:

Cat People (1942)
1:05am Wednesday, 27 Feb 2008
A beautiful girl believes she is turning into a panther and killing her friends. CAST: Simone Simon, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, Elizabeth Russell DIR: Jacques Tourneur

Cat People (1942): Another sound - the panther - it screams like a woman

Curse Of The Cat People (1944)
2:30am Wednesday, 27 Feb 2008
The story of a little girl who can communicate with the ghost of her father’s dead wife. CAST: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Elizabeth Russell DIR: Robert Wise and Gunther V. Fritsch

Secret Beyond The Door (1948)
1:20am Friday, 29 Feb 2008
An heiress meets an architect on vacation in Mexico and they marry after a whirlwind courtship. Soon after, she starts to wonder if her husband is trying to kill her. CAST: Joan Bennett DIR: Fritz Lang

Crossfire (1947)
2:30am Wednesday, 05 Mar 2008
A Jewish man is murdered in a New York Hotel. CAST: Robert Young, Robert Mitchum DIR: Edward Dmytryk

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

James Ellory, in the documentary film, Film Noir: Bringing Darkness to Light (2006) says of film noir of the classic period: [film noir] exposited one great theme, and that great theme is “your fucked”.

Jieho Lee’s The Air I Breathe (2007), is a very unusual Hollywood movie that goes beyond genre and episodically explores dark and mystical motifs: memory, love, violence, criminality, ambition, alienation, urban ennui and existential angst, causality, serendipity, and even the butterfly effect cum six degrees of separation. The episodes are based on an ancient Chinese proverb that breaks life down into four elements:

happiness: clerk (Forest Whitaker) bets his life on a horse race
pleasure: criminal enforcer (Brendan Fraser) sees the future
sorrow: pop star (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is caught in the ultra-violent web of crime boss “Fingers” (Andy Garcia)
love: a doctor (Kevin Bacon) must save the life of his lost love (Julie Delpy).

The film opens with happiness. A timid clerk in an office job who has always done the right thing is lonely and unhappy, desperately sees money as a way out to happiness (sound familiar?). After waking that morning from a nightmare to see a butterfly fly into his bedroom, he surreptitiously overhears office colleagues who are betting on a fixed horse race, with “Butterfly” to win. He places a $50,000 off-course bet and (yeah) the horse takes a dive and he does his dough. He is now in hock to Fingers, and has two weeks to make good his bet, before he starts losing his fingers. Fingers’ stand-over man gives him a gun on a “home visit” as some kind of solution.

The clerk’s voice-over in the next scene begins: “Sometimes being totally fucked can be a liberating experience…” and then he lays out his plan for a bank heist, which has nowhere to go but wrong, and he dies in a hail of police bullets on the roof of an office building, but not before he throws the bag with the bank money over the side of the building, laughing deeply and profoundly in a dervish-er whirl of liberation…

There is an interesting related post by Lloydville on his mardecortesbaja.com blog: The Message Of Film Noir.

Police manhunt for a kidnapped blind girl

Union City (1951) directed by Rudolph Mate is a period crime action movie set in Chicago that marks the transition from the classic period of film noir to the 50’s police procedural. While the picture is weakened by a conventional plot and a fairly laconic performance from William Holden as the railway cop, the location shooting (actually on the streets of LA) has a “naked city” feel and the action played out in Union Station is made interesting by certain noirish episodes.

A truly bungled surveillance op on an elevated railway line climaxes in a cattle stockyard where a chase and shootout leaves one of the hoods trampled to death after a stampede set-off by the gun-fire.

A second hood spills the beans to the cops after he is taken down to the train shed to be worked-over and threatened with decapitation by steam train.

The final chase and shootout in the labyrinthine power plant and service tunnels under Union Station is a classic, with superior direction and camera work.

But the really impressive scene is when the cops arrive late at night on a deserted street outside a suspected hideout in a sleazy boarding house. It flows elegantly and has a strongly surreal quality without musical scoring.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

The Seattle program from February 15–21 2008:

The Prowler / Gun Crazy
Friday, feb 15, 7pm

High Sierra / The Hard Way
Saturday, feb 16, 1pm, 7pm

Moonrise / Night Has a Thousand Eyes
Sunday, feb 17, 1pm, 7pm

Woman in Hiding / Jeopardy
Monday, feb 18, 1pm, 6pm

Reign of Terror / Border Incident
Tuesday, feb 19, 7pm

Night and the City / Roadhouse
Wednesday, feb 20, 7:15pm

Conflict / The Suspect
Thursday, feb 21, 7:15pm

Full details

Homme-fatale, Van Heflin, seduces lonely housewife, Evelyn Keyes, and murders her husband for the woman and the inheritance. The dirty underbelly of the American dream exposed to scourging desert winds.

The screenplay of Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951 - Horizon Pictures), was written by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who also wrote another film noir script, Gun Crazy (1950). The Prowler is a sordid tale of passion, entrapment, and betrayal. Suburbia cast as a dark nightmare, where the predator comes disguised as protector. Bravura performances from the two leads carry a flawed script forward to a classic denouement at the base of a tailings dump on the dusty outskirts of a ghost-town.

Losey’s direction is unforgiving. Each squalid act of the protagonist is forecast in tight claustrophobic framing that is almost suffocating.

Finally justice propels the action out into the desert.

Not available on DVD. Recently restored by the Film Noir Foundation and screened in January at Noir City 6.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

More great noirs you can to catch ad-free on Australia’s ABC HD Digital TV over the next fortnight:

Out Of The Past (1947)
1:20am Friday, 08 Feb 2008
A detective is hired to find a crook’s girlfriend. From the novel ‘Build My Gallows High’ by Geoffrey Homes. CAST: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming DIR: Jacques Tourneur
Out Of The Past: Tourneur’s Mise En Scene
Out Of The Past: Tourneur’s Mise En Scene Revisited

On Dangerous Ground (1951)
12:55am Monday, 11 Feb 2008
A tough cop falls for a criminal’s blind sister. CAST: Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Ward Bond, Charles Kemper, Anthony Ross, Ed Begley DIR: Nicholas Ray

Angel Face (1953)
2:20am Monday, 11 Feb 2008
A girl tries to kill her rich stepmother in an auto crash, implicating the family chauffeur, but her beloved father is killed as well. CAST: Jean Simmons, Robert Mitchum, Mona Freeman, Herbert Marshall. DIR: Otto Preminger

Michael Guillen of San Francisco in his blog, The Evening Class, has posted an interesting series of reports from the Noir City festival, for those noir fans who couldn’t make it:

• NOIR CITY 6 — Eddie Muller Intro to 20th Century Fox Doublebill: Hangover Square and Dangerous Crossing
• NOIR CITY 6 — Diego Rivera’s Cargador de Flores
• NOIR CITY 6 — Eddie Muller Intro to the “Dames Tough As Nails” Double Bill: A Woman In Hiding and Jeopardy
• NOIR CITY 6 — The Grand Inquisitor
• NOIR CITY 6 — James Ellroy Intro to Dalton Trumbo Double Bill
• NOIR CITY 6 — The Evening Class Interview With Editor Megan Abbot and a Handful of Writers from A Hell Of A Woman
• NOIR CITY 6—Eddie Muller Introductory Remarks