Over four weeks from August 8 to September 4 the NY Film Forum Movie House, 209 West Houston Street, New York NY 10014, will screen 39 (!) French films noir and thrillers.

The full program has not yet been released, but the French Embassy’s French culture site has released early details:

“This festival of 39 prime examples opens with the late ex-pat Jules Dassin’s classic heist picture Rififi, which kick-started a whole new cycle of French Noir, and includes both classics and rarities by such masters of the genre as Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le flambeur, Le Cercle rouge, Un flic), Jacques Becker (Touchez pas au grisbi), Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique, Wages of Fear), Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face), René Clément (Purple Noon), Louis Malle (Elevator to the Gallows), Claude Chabrol (La Cérémonie), and François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid, The Bride Wore Black). Among the many stars showcased are the five great hommes durs (tough guys) of the genre — Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, Yves Montand, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Alain Delon — and such femmes fatales as Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Brigitte Bardot. The festival concludes with a one-week run of Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player.“

Mirage (1965)

From an article, Film noir goes to war, in the TLS by Philip French:

Edward Dmytryk, Canadian son of Ukrainian immigrants, worked his way up in the cinema business from studio messenger boy to make Farewell My Lovely [aka Murder, My Sweet (1944)] . He followed this with two other crucial noir pictures, Cornered (1945), about war crimes and neo-Nazism, and Crossfire (1947), centring on returning veterans and post-war anti-Semitism. He was one of the Hollywood Ten, left-wing filmmakers jailed for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Unlike the others, he emerged from prison to reappear before HUAC, name former Communist associates and go back to work, making large-scale anti-Communist and conformist potboilers. But in 1965 he directed Mirage, an undervalued noir thriller, shot in black-and-white, turning on one of the genre’s favourite themes, amnesia, and indicting the military-industrial establishment which Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned against in one of his final speeches as President. It helped open the way for a new kind of political cinema that was to include such post-Watergate movies as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.

From Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye (1953):

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is a blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that god-damned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absentmindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

The dream across the way was none of these, not even of that kind of world. She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color.

Young woman helps cops find her father’s killer

A poverty row b-thriller from a competent RKO production team. A scheming blonde, a suave villain, and an amateur female sleuth are packaged into 70 minutes of satisfying entertainment, with just a hint of sexual ambiguity and a novel twist with a reversal of roles between ego and alter-ego.  Two smooth jazz interludes from Steve Gibson’s Redcaps in the Vogue night-club, and a great denoument scene at the end involving a pianola are highlights.

The long-lost original print of a Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece, Metropolis (1927), has been found in Argentina.

The original 3½-hour film was believed lost  after its US distributor, Paramount, cut it by 30 minutes after a poor reception from critics. But the German newspaper Die Zeit has reported that a copy of the original was sent to Argentina in 1928, where it has been gathering dust in the Buenos Aires Film Museum.

The lost footage, some of which is badly scratched, includes battle scenes and sections that flesh out a number of subplots and characters. Paula Felix-Didier, the curator of the museum, viewed the film only after a chance remark from a projectionist, who noted that it was longer than other versions. A film restorer who has seen the new footage said the film had its rhythm back. Source: The Telegraph - London

The Webster University Film Series will present a Samuel Fuller film each Thursday through July, starting tonight with his directorial debut, I Shot Jesse James (1949).

Coming up:

Pickup on South Street (1949) - July 10
Underworld, U.S.A (1961) - July 17
Shock Corridor (1963)  - July 24
The Big Red One (1980) - July 31

Ex-con on parole tracks down escaped con who tried to kill him after a prison bust and a trail of violent robberies (RKO 70min)

San Quentin (1946), an early RKO factory job, not to be confused with the early Bogart movie of 1937, is a shoot-em-up with a message, complete with a real-life intro from an ex-Warden of Sing-Sing.

Tough guy actor, Lawrence Tierney, the bad-guy from The Devil Thumbs A Ride (1947), plays it straight as the defender of a prison reform program under threat, who falls under suspicion for the attempted murder of a cop after a violent prison escape. The direction is tight and the night scenes are nicely lit in noir fashion.  A mean on-the-streets car chase and a gripping hand-to-hand climax tie the ribbon on this one.

This is the original NY Times review from 1947:

“As an attempted deviation from the normal prison melodrama, “San Quentin,” which made its appearance at the Gotham on Saturday, suffers the curse of a split personality. For the story line of this offering forks between seriously extolling self rehabilitation among convicts and straight cops-and-robbers adventure. And, rather early in its course, the yarn about an ex-prisoner and founder of San Quentin’s Inmates Welfare League, whose good work is nearly wrecked by an escaped killer, strays from its noble intentions to settle down to a traditional manhunt. From there on the going is normal, prosaic and only occasionally exciting.

Lawrence Tierney, whose screen portrait of Dillinger made that outlaw a paragon of hate, violence and bad temper, is the grim lad who seeks the killer, to vindicate the good names of the warden and the League. Mr. Tierney makes an indomitable, two-fisted, steely-eyed and tight-lipped tracker. But he is a sleuth—a man under parole at that—who shuns the aid of the law, a circumstance which is rather difficult to nationalize. As a man who has crashed out of countless cinema jails, Barton MacLane is thoroughly acceptable as the apparently reformed bank robber who escapes to sully the League’s escutcheon. As a climactic touch, the hand-to-hand showdown between MacLane and Tierney, makes quite an edifying donnybrook. Marian Carr and Joe Devlin as Tierney’s girl friend and sidekick, respectively; Harry Shannon and Tony Barrett handle some of the principal roles. And, though former Warden Lewis E. Lawes of Sing Sing sounds a note of approval in the prologue, “San Quentin” can hardly be listed as a documentary.”

From Raymond Chandler’s novel, Farewell, My lovely (1940):

It got darker.  I thought; and thought in my mind moved with a kind of sluggish stealthiness, as if it was being watched by bitter and sadisitic eyes. I thought of dead eyes looking at a moonless sky, with black blood at the corners of the mouths beneath them…

It got darker. The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling. I sat up on the bed and put my feet on the floor and rubbed the back of my neck.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room…

‘I’m scared,’ I said suddenly. ‘I’m scared stiff… I’m afraid of death and despair,’ I said. ‘Of dark water and drowned men’s faces and skulls with empty eyesockets.  I’am a fraid of dying, of being nothing…’