Phantom Lady (1944)

Thanks to Dark City Dame for this news.

The University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMP/PFA) will from February 13, 2009 to February 28, 2009  screen a series of movies adapted from the works of four great pulp writers: Fredric Brown, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Cornell Woolrich

Friday, February 13, 2009
6:30 pm Crack-Up
In this hallucinatory noir based on a Fredric Brown story, Pat O’Brien is an expert in forged paintings with a tenuous grasp on the boundary between real and fake—in art and in life.

8:30 pm The Kill-Off
Maggie Greenwald captures Jim Thompson’s dismal vision of an off-season resort. “A nasty, claustrophobic little gem.”—Paper

Thursday, February 19, 2009
6:30 pm Miami Blues
Introduced by Don Herron. Fred Ward plays Charles Willeford’s detective Hoke Moseley, in pursuit of sociopath Alec Baldwin and collegiate call girl Jennifer Jason Leigh. “A pungent, blithely violent thriller.”—New Yorker

8:45 pm Black Angel
Introduced by Elliot Lavine. Dan Duryea and June Vincent in a booze-drenched B-movie version of the Cornell Woolrich novel.

Saturday, February 21, 2009
6:30 pm Phantom Lady
Robert Siodmak swathes a Cornell Woolrich mystery in Expressionist shadow.

8:30 pm Série noire
Introduced by Dennis Harvey. Patrick Dewaere is the perfect fall guy in “the darkest, daffiest, and downright dazzlingest adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel ever.”—S.F. Bay Guardian

Saturday, February 28, 2009
6:30 pm Screaming Mimi
Anita Ekberg goes from the madhouse to El Madhouse, a nightclub run by Gypsy Rose Lee, in this lusciously lurid psychodrama based on a novel by Fredric Brown.

8:15 pm The Woman Chaser
Introduced by Don Herron. A conniving used-car salesman turns his talents to the movie biz in this neon-drenched neo-noir, adapted from Charles Willeford’s novel.

Full details from BAMP/PFA

These are the films noir I have lined up for review on FilmsNoir.Net over the next few weeks (not necessarily in order):

The Lost Weekend (1945)
Dir: Billy Wilder
Cast: Ray Milland, Jane Wyman

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
Dir: Lewis Milestone
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Lizabeth Scott, Kirk Douglas

Brute Force (1947)
Dir: Jules Dassin
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn

The Dark Mirror (1946)
Dir: Robert Siodmak
Cast: Olivia de Havilland, Lew Ayres

Nora Prentiss (1947)
Dir: Vincent Sherman
Cast: Ann Sheridan, Kent Smith

The Naked City (1948)
Dir: Jules Dassin
Cast: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart

Port of New York (1949)
Dir: László Benedek
Cast: Scott Brady, Richard Rober, K.T. Stevens, Yul Brynner

Macao (1952)
Dir: Josef Von Sternberg
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, Thomas Gomez, Gloria Grahame

The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Dir: Charles Laughton
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish

This January will be the Darkest Month in Coleman’s Corner.

For the month of January,  Alexander Coleman, from Coleman’s Corner in Cinema will be the guest of  Dark City Dame at  Noirish City, where he will be talking noir and selecting noirs for review on his blog.

This event will be a fitting lead-up to the Noir City 7 Film Noir Series in San Francisco from January 23 to February 1, which will have a newspaper theme -  visit the Noir City site for full details.  Alexander will don fedora and trench-coat to report direct from Noir City for Dark City Dame.

I have come across two interesting video clips on YouTube. The first features a short interview with Ms Savage about Detour from a documentary on the film’s director Edgar G. Ulmer.  The second is the official trailer for My Winnipeg.  Of interest also is Eddie Muller’s book Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir which has a chapter on Ms Savage based on a mid-90s interview.

“Say who do you think you’re talking to - a hick? Listen Mister, I been around,
and I know a wrong guy when I see one. What’d you do, kiss him with a wrench? “

Ann Savage, who played the dark dame, Vera, in Edgar G. Ulmer’s cult noir Detour (1945), has died aged 87.

Her Hollywood career had largely been over since the mid-1950s, but she had a resurgence over the past year with a starring role in Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg. Starting with her 1943 debut in the crime story One Dangerous Night, Savage made more than 30 films through the 1950s, including the Westerns Saddles and Sagebrush and Satan’s Cradle, musicals  such as Dancing in Manhattan and Ever Since Venus, and wartime stories like Passport to Suez (AAP).

When announcing her passing,  Savage’s manager, Kent Adamson said of her performance in Detour:

“It’s actually a showcase role… [Tom] Neal and Savage really reversed the traditional male-female roles of the time. She’s vicious and predatory. She’s been called a harpy from hell, and in the film, too, she’s very sexually aggressive, and he’s very, very passive. It’s very unusual for a 40s film to have a woman come on that strong.”

The Time Out Film Guide says of Detour:

“Neither pure thriller nor pure melodrama (though it has its true complement of doomed lovers, dead bodies, and a cruel sexual undertow), on an emotional level it most resembles the wonderful purple-pulp fiction of David Goodis. Passion joins with folly to produce termite art par excellence.”

Detour is in the public domain, and can be viewed below.

On December 16, Criterion will start issuing Blu-ray versions of digital transfers from its catalog, and the initial launch will include a new restored high-definition digital transfer of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). The disk features uncompressed audio and a feast of extras.

Dr. Svet Atanasov of Blu-ray.com has given the disk a gushing review:

“The Third Man arrives in a handsome 1080p transfer lacking the tiny little lines seen on the SDVD version. As a result, not only does this transfer look mighty impressive on a large HDTV set but, blown through a digital projector, it convincingly overshadows the image quality the SDVD set boasts. Here the blacks are rich and lush, the whites are sharp, and the actual color-scheme significantly more nuanced than that seen on the SDVD. Furthermore, contrast is absolutely superb. The fine film grain The Third Man reveals is perfectly intact and I could not help but admire how impressive the picture quality is. Folks, this isn’t the rant of a film snob who has been suddenly exposed to a marvelous discovery, no, this is the evaluation of someone who has seen four different releases of The Third Man and each time he found that there was something of substantial importance missing…  The dialog is crystal clear and very easy to follow, there aren’t any inconsistencies that I could detect, and overall it really shows that serious restoration efforts have gone into securing a deserving audio presentation. Of course, I am certain, the big question many of you are pondering is: Is there a difference between the SDVD mono track and the uncompressed mono track the Blu-ray version boasts. Yes, there is. I was listening very carefully last night and I could convincingly state that not only is the uncompressed mono track clearer but it is also, I hope this makes sense, more stable.“

The Criterion Blu-rays will be the same price as their standard DVDs.

The Criterion page for this disk has full details.

The Centennial DVD Edition of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) has been released today, and is packed with many extras. The transfer is reported to have been  tweaked from the 2002 release.  Jeremy Thomas of 411manic.com has posted a detailed review including a full listing of the extras provided on the DVD.

I have discovered a cool DVD catalog site which has many hard-to-find noirs at very reasonable prices Yammering Magpies Cinema Film Noir Catalog.