Noir City 7: Best Essay
San Francisco Bay Guardian critic Max Goldberg has written what I think is the best essay to come out of Noir City 7 - Late Edition posted on his text of light blog:
“… The newsroom is as much a part of noir’s topography as the police station, boxing ring or nightclub. Deadline-U.S.A. (1952), Scandal Sheet (1952), The Big Clock (1948), While the City Sleeps (1956): the titles bow to the newspaper’s ubiquitous pulse by slinging shop-talk into nighthawk poetry. The press curries a surplus of centralized power in this cycle of films, exerting a primary influence over the whole urban mechanism…”
Noir City 7: Reports from Alexander Coleman
Noir fan and erudite film blogger Alexander Coleman has posted at Coleman’s Corner in Cinema some outstanding reports from and reviews of noirs screened at Frisco’s Castro Theatre at Noir City 7, including:
- Shakedown (1950)
- Night Editor (1946)
- Slightly Scarlet (1956)
- Dispatches from Noir City 7
- Deadline-USA (1952)
These posts and other noir reviews are also hosted at Dark City Dame’s Noirish City.
Noir City 7: Report by Hell on Frisco Bay
Brian from Hell on Frisco Bay in his report on Noir City has a lot of interesting news on upcoming noir-related events and impressions of some of the noirs screened this year. Particularly exciting news is his report that Eddie Muller is working on an international noir series, and that while Muller was in Buenos Aires to meet the archivists who made last summer’s announcement of rediscovered footage lost from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, he came across a trove of Argentine films from the 1930s made by the great noir cinematographer John Alton.
From The Vaults of Universal: Seven Classic Films Noir
Starting Monday February 16, the Heights Theatre in Minneapolis is screening a short series of classic films noir:
February 16 7:30pm This Gun For Hire (1942)
February 23 7:30pm Criss Cross (1949) | 9:15pm The Killers (1946)
March 2 7:30pm The Big Clock (1948)
March 9 7:30pm The Blue Dahlia (1946) | 9:15pm The Glass Key (1942)
March 16 7:30pm The Phantom Lady (1944)
Jean-Pierre Melville, Director: Notes on the French Auteur’s Career
This month’s edition of Bright Lights Film Journal features an article by Garry Morris on Melville, whose noirs include Bob le Flambeur, Le Doulos, Le Samourai, & The Red Circle .
Robert Ryan: A Moon for the Misbegotten
This month’s edition of Bright Lights also features an article by Dan Callahan on noir icon Robert Ryan.
Lost Anthony Manne B-Noir to be Restored
Eddie Muller announced at Noir City 7 that The Film Noir Foundation together with the UCLA Film and Television Archive will restore Anthony Mann’s lost 1944 b-noir Strangers in the Night. When I read this I was thunderstruck - I have this movie recorded from somewhere and have never watched it! You now know which movie I have lined up next for viewing…
This is quite a film noir celebration and and as such a schedule to die for. The Minny venue is surprisingly solid as well. Alexander Coleman has indeed done a yeoman’s job with his gleefully singular experience. Kudos! Enjoy the planned line-up!
Hi! Tony,
I really like your “new” Film Noir Digest section” believe me, I will try to keep “feeding” the section with as much film noir news as, I can “gather,” but I doubt if I can “feed” it all the great news that you just supplied to your
readers today. I just “reread” your post and upon further “inspection” all can say is…Wow!
Tony said,”Eddie Muller announced at Noir City 7 that The Film Noir Foundation together with the UCLA Film and Television Archive will restore Anthony Mann’s lost 1944 b-noir Strangers in the Night.” Wow! This is really great news!…because next to Hitchcock, Mann is my second fav(orite) director.
Tks,
DarkCityDame :)
Thanks Dcd and Sam. Glad to hear you found the Digest interestng.
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/63/63ryan.html
Robert Ryan haas an eventful and interesting bio that accounts for his Noir roles . His hard and beatened face give new dimensions and meaning to Noir. Note the below:
Born into a lace-curtain Irish family in Chicago, Ryan saw his father lose most of his money in the 1929 market crash. He attended a Jesuit high school, then went on to be a champion boxer at Dartmouth before bumming around for a few years in the lean 1930s. “I spent seven years of vagabonding,” he said, “working at this and that and not being very interested in anything I was doing.” This hard-knock education gave him a real-world knowledge in his face and body that most actors lack, so that he was never really a young-looking man on screen, even in his breakthrough, a queasy Ginger Rogers vehicle called Tender Comrade (1943) that later got its writer, Dalton Trumbo, in trouble for injecting “Communist propaganda” into the script (at one point Ginger says, “Share and share alike, that’s democracy.”). Ryan joined the army soon after and became a drill sergeant, which surely effected his later work as an actor, and he came out of the war as a man with pacifist leanings. These ideals were backed up by his marriage to Jungian scholar and novelist Jessica Cadwalader; together, they had three children and even started a progressive elementary school in Hollywood.
Note his film credit “Crossfire”
QUote
Ryan was a socially conscious liberal, but he had to swallow his principles a few times during his stint as a contract player at RKO, appearing in the dread 1949 Howard Hughes project I Married a Communist (later renamed The Woman on Pier 13) and several standard war movies where he looks distinctly uncomfortable mouthing pro-military sentiments. But in Crossfire (1947, right), a well-meaning, effective noir film about an anti-Semitic murder, Ryan resoundingly established himself as the screen’s pre-eminent player of dyed-in-the-wool bigots. As Montgomery, a chummy bully with a lust for discipline and an unreasoning hatred of Jews, Ryan sketches in the barroom stink of this man’s mind in odious detail, and he was so vivid in this part, which won him his only Oscar nomination, that he played periodic reprises of it for the rest of his life: as a gun-toting, small-town hater of the Japanese in Bad Day at Black Rock (1954), and then a truly awful hater of blacks in Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). (Surely if he’d lived he would have played a hater and killer of gays, too.) A lifelong leftist and fighter for civil rights, Ryan was forever scourging right-wing intolerance in his best bigot roles, and surely playing these men full out cost him personally, at times. “I have been in films pretty well everything I am dedicated to fighting against,” he once said, a touch wearily.
Great stuff Edward! My favorite Ryan noirs are The Set-Up (1949) and On Dangerous Ground (1951). In the Set-Up he reveals a vulnerable persona and on Dangerous Ground he moves from being a troubled bigoted cop to a man of tenderness and compassion.