The American Cinematheque Noir City Film Noir Festival 2009 will run from April 2-19, 2009 at LA’s famous Egyptian Theatre.

The Series will feature many rare noirs and a number of newly restored prints. Hosted by co-programmers Eddie Muller, Alan K. Rode and Chris D, who on the last day of the Series, Sunday, April 19, will present a special afternoon memorial tribute to actress Ann Savage with testimonial panels and screenings.

The festival will feature:

• A Jane Greer double bill: the classic OUT OF THE PAST co-starring Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, and the rare THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS
• Robert Siodmak’s rarely screened FLY-BY-NIGHT, Fritz Lang’s WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS
• An Anthony Mann double feature, the rare TWO O’CLOCK COURAGE and DESPERATE
• A Newspaper Noir double bill of DEADLINE U.S.A. and the ultra-rare CHICAGO DEADLINE, plus THE RACKET, THE ENFORCER,  AND WALK SOFTLY STRANGER
• Joseph Losey’s rare CHANCE MEETING, NOCTURNE
• Rare and forgotten B Noirs SMOOTH AS SILK and ROSES ARE RED

There are also new prints of rarities like John Farrow’s ALIAS NICK BEAL, Joseph Losey’s THE PROWLER, SIX BRIDGES TO CROSS, WOMAN ON PIER 13, and THE OCTOBER MAN.

Full details at the Egyptian Theatre.

“It’s a bitter little world full of sad surprises, and you don’t let anyone hurt you.”

Hollow Triumph (aka The Scar) is a gem of a movie. A wildly implausible plot adds to the baroque charm of this melodramatic sleeper, which bombed on its release in 1948.  The basic plot-line – a  hood on the run after robbing a gambling house takes on the identity of a psychiatrist – does not do justice to the moral perversity and spiralling ironies of fate that propel the action.

We have all the ingredients for great noir entertainment: a compelling screenplay and a witty script from Daniel Fuchs (Criss-Cross, Panic in the Streets), a director of pulp-b’s in Austro-Hungarian émigré Steve Sekely, the artful cinematography of noir icon John Alton, and Paul Henreid and Joan Bennet both cast against type in the lead roles – as mirror-reversals of the typical noir archetypes – an homme-fatale of unbounded ambition and no scruples seduces a woman of strong character and with a real job.   Paul Henreid is so suave and daring, even when a photo-processor’s  diabolical and irreversibly dangerous error threatens to blow his subterfuge wide open, he  remains audacious and enthralling.  But the imperatives of the noir universe dictate that  his one-minute-to-midnight failed shot at redemption is as dramatic and ironic as it is pathetic.  On the journey to perdition we traverse a noir topography redolent with noir archetypes:  the unreformed con, the old gang coerced into a fateful big heist that goes wrong, the savage intimidation of underlings, life on the run, and the machinations required to find an out from a past that is getting ever close and will not go away.

All this aside, it is Alton’s dark and moody camera-work that defines the cinematic reality that lights up the screen.  There is a magnificent scene in a hotel room with Henreid and his straight but sympathetic brother, who has tracked him down to tell him that those out to kill him are closer and more adamant than he thinks. Once he learns the news, Henreid flips off  the lights in panic, fearing that his brother has led the killers to him. In the darkness, a flashing neon sign outside the windows rhythmically lights up the slats of the drawn venetian blinds sending streaked shadows across the protagonists.  Alton also constructs breathtaking hallucinatory montages that have to rank as perhaps the best I have seen in a Hollywood movie.  The stuff that noirs are made of.

Director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton transform a police procedural screenplay into a dark visionary descent into a subterranean noir realm, where two undercover cops inhabit a flip-side life of criminality, brutality, and violence.  These men exist almost exclusively as ciphers whose lives have meaning only in the dark seething undertow of a sinister metropolis. So immersed are these men, that the dying words of one are cheap remonstrations of deceit, and the final vengeful shootout delivers a duel to the death.  Add to the mix, stand-out performances by Dennis O’Keefe as the T-man O’Brien, Wally Ford as a doomed hood who carries the richly redolent moniker of ‘the Schemer’, and Charles McGraw as the ruthless hit-man ‘Moxie’, and you have a top-flight thriller.

Every scene in this movie is a set-piece where the mis-en-scene, the lighting, and the camera’s fluid peregrinations in an electric fusion of a chiaroscuro aesthetic and technical mastery,  draw the viewer into a hyper-reality of grim tension, dark tenements, hellish steam baths, desolate streets, seedy nightclubs, drab wharves, rusting cargo steamers, sinister business offices, and the decadent palatial homes of mobsters.  This nether world is rotten to the core – each time a boss is uncovered yet another further up the social scale surfaces.

Only a touch of pathos is allowed when one of the T-Men and his wife have to deny their identities and feign being strangers, and even this scene telegraphs the cop’s fate as we leave the wife with the glint of a tear in her estranged eyes.

One of the classic noirs – not to be missed.

Jules Dassin: 1911-2008

Rififi (1955)

The New York Film Forum from March 27 to April 12 will host a Jules Dassin retrospective over 12 days.  March 31 mark the anniversary of Dassin’s passing. All of Dassin’s major features will be screened, including:

• Brute Force (1947)
  
• The Naked City (1948)
• Thieves’ Highway (1949)
• Night And the City (1950)
• Rififi (1955)

Full program

Masculine Impairment in Film Noir

Double Indemnity (1944)

An interesting article, Masculine Impairment in Double Indemnity and The Last Seduction, by Kerry E Bogert has been posted at Red Room, an on-line writer’s collective.

Follow Me Quietly (1949) Tue 10Mar09 7:15am

March will be a monster month for film noir at TCM.  A stack of classic noirs will be supplemented with expressionist silent classics, noir westerns, pulp b’s from the 50s, noir horror movies from the 50s, and more.

Checkout my TCM noir selection for March here.

In the only film directed by Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter, we have an example of the danger of applying a template approach to establishing a picture as a film noir. Expressionist lighting and criminality – tick. But these elements alone do not a noir make. The Night of the Hunter is a gothic tale of good versus evil: there is no ambivalence nor an inversion of traditional values. Good triumphs over evil and the story ends.

This is not to say Night of the Hunter is not a great film- it assuredly is.  A tale about a psychotic and murderous Southern preacher terrorising two children who know the whereabouts of a loot of stolen money is not without flaws, but great nonetheless. The compelling screenplay, first class acting, atmospheric cinematography, and an enthralling stylised mise-en-scene from a first-time director make it great.

The editing is not fluid however, and the narrative flow suffers. Whether this is due to cuts made after completion of the preview version is uncertain. In a new book on the making of the movie, author Jeffrey Coachman says Laughton re-interpreted James Agee’s script, which itself was based on the first novel of Davis Grubb. The original Agee script surfaced in 2003, and out-takes still exist and have been viewed by Couchman. Also certain studio scenes clash jarringly with on-location shots.  Scenes in a small town near the end of the film are so obviously set-bound, that the drama takes on a theatrical tone which weakens the ‘reality’ of the story. The ending steers perilously close to sentimentality, but is saved by the luminous acting of Lillian Gish.

Other weaknesses relate to a certain moral relativism. The opening scene that establishes the story arc is not as strong as it should be – a weak performance by Peter Graves as the father on-the-run with the loot is redeemed only by the young actors playing his children. The father is caught and hanged, after sharing his cell with the evil preacher played superbly by Robert Mitchum, who learns that the loot has been hidden but not where. In the cell, disturbingly, the father justifies his crime, and presumably the killing of two people during the robbery, by saying he did it so his kids would not suffer during the hard times of the depression. After the hanging, the hangman is shown going home to his wife and young children and his remorse is clearly established. Yet at the end he is shown gleefully anticipating the hanging of another man – the preacher. An elderly married couple who are friends of Grave’s widow and portrayed as the salt of the earth in their generosity and concern for the woman alone struggling to raise her two children, at the end of the movie are transformed into unhinged rabble-rousers screaming for revenge and leading a lynch mob.

These weaknesses aside, there are stunningly elegiac scenes as the story unfolds. The most compelling is of the murdered widow still sitting upright in a car submerged in a river.