Noir City DC 2010

The Film Noir Foundation and AFI roll out Noir City DC October 16th-November 3rd, and it looks to be another raging success. The lineup this year is an embarrassment of riches:

Border Incident-Anthony Mans's gritty illegal immigrant noir, featuring amazing work by cinematographer John Alton.

Stranger on the Third Floor-Arguably the first film noir.

Vertigo-Hitchcock directs Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in one of the truly essential American films.

Criss Cross-Robert Siodmak directs Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo in a 100% perfect film noir. A masterpiece.

Act of Violence-Robert Ryan and Van Heflin in this long dark night of the soul. A beautiful and brilliant (and vastly underrated) masterpiece.

Pitfall-Lizabeth Scott, Dick Powell, and Raymond Burr in Andre De Toth's love triangle from hell. One of my favorite films.

Pushover-Yet another underrated masterpiece! Bad girl Kim Novak and bad cop Fred McMurray fall in love and hell opens under their feet.

The Night of the Hunter-Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish square off in this Flannery O'Connor meets Caligari nightmare. Brilliant--and not to be missed on the big screen.

And more!

This is an extraordinary collection of films, a mix of established gems and overlooked works of genius. If you live in or around the DC area (or if you just happen to be in town for the Jon Stewart/Stepehn Colbert rally on the National Mall), do not pass up an opportunity to see some of the these works on the big screen in the gorgeous AFI facility.

In Theaters Now

Here are some thoughts on current movies out right now.

1. "Up"-The older I get, the more interested I am in the raw materials of cinema. Contrasts of light, color combinations, movement and stillness, sounds and silence--these things are the component parts of cinema but we rarely stop to consider them as such. A good place to stop and observe them at work is in the new Pixar movie, Up, directed by Pete Docter. Now, I'm not normally an animation enthusiast, but something about Up caught my eye. I am here to report that it is a complete delight, a hugely entertaining movie with big laughs, eye-candy visuals of thrilling scope and accomplishment, and a few scenes of real emotional impact (there's a death near the beginning of the film that is as touching as anything I've seen at a movie in a while). The story of an elderly man and small boy who float to South America in a house hoisted by hundreds of balloons, Up is a capital-G Great film. Here's the trailer.

2. "Public Enemies"-I've waited a few days to write about this film because my feelings about it are unresolved. The story of John Dillinger as told by director Michael Mann, Public Enemies is well acted (for the most part) and sharply made, but I feel like there's something of an emotional disconnect at the center of it. Johnny Depp is charismatic as Dillinger but the character remains an enigma. Who is this guy? I'm not sure if Mann and Depp want us to think of him as a master thief or a self-deluded idiot. Maybe both. The cast around Depp is mostly effective--Marion Cotillard and Billy Crudup are particularly good--but I do not know what has happened to Christian Bale. His emotional intensity seems to have imploded, sucking in all his personality as an actor. He plays Melvin Purvis, a fascinating figure who was eventually double-crossed by J. Edgar Hoover and took his own life, but Bale's take on the character baffled me. He mostly scowls. Bale's a talented performer, but he needs...something. I could say the same thing about the movie. Here's the trailer.

3. "Whatever Works"-I remain an unreconstructed Woody Allen fanatic. It's become fashionable to flog the old boy, but he remains one of my favorite filmmakers. He's turned out a film every year--more or less--since 1969. Some of them are numbered among my favorite movies. Some of them are excellent, some are strong, some are weak, some are terrible. I'll concede some things: Allen has made a higher percentage of poor films in the last fifteen years than at anytime in his career, and two of these films--Hollywood Ending and Scoop--are the two worst films he's ever made. God, I hate Scoop. Having said that, Sweet and Lowdown ranks among his best work, Melinda and Melinda is an interesting film, and Match Point is a terrific neonoir, the best non-comedy he's made. To this list of good films, I would add Whatever Works, a comedy starring Larry David. The film has gotten mixed reviews, but, in America anyway, Woody Allen always gets mixed reviews. Critics often break down three ways: those who love Allen, those who think he's just repeating himself, those who think he's just repeating himself and hate him for it (this last group tends to strongly overlap with those who hate him for marrying his adoptive daughter). I'm an Allen lover, a fanatic really. I look forward to his yearly releases the same way I eagerly await the yearly release of a Robert B. Parker Spenser novel. So, granted, I'm inclined to like this movie. And I laughed all the way through it--and so did the audience I saw it with. When it was over, we walked out of the theater with silly smiles on our faces. It's a happy film about a nihilist, and I love nothing so much as happy films about nihilists. Here's the trailer.

4. "The Thin Man"-In the retrospective category of current releases, the AFI in Silver Spring (one of the greatest movie theaters in the world) is showing all six Thin Man films. The comedy/mystery series starred William Powell and Myrna Loy as the wisecracking alcoholic duo, Nick and Nora Charles. It's the 75th (!!!) anniversary of the first film and it is extraordinary how well it holds up. The charm of the film is the pairing of Powell and Loy. Powell delivered one-liners better than anyone in movies, and Myrna Loy is so damn adorable I don't have words for it. The series stayed strong through the second, third, and forth films, started to flag with the fifth, and puttered out with the sixth. Still, Powell and Loy never lost their chemistry. Here's the AFI's page on the series.

Things I Might See:

"The Hangover"-It's doubtful I'll commit a trip to the theater to see this film, but I've only heard it's hilarious from people whose definition of hilarious conforms to my own. So maybe it's a Netflix.

"The Taking Of Pelham 1 2 3"-I'll be honest, if someone else had played the bad guy here I might have gone to see this movie. Denzel Washington is one of our most consistently effective actors, but Travolta is a long way from Pulp Fiction has his credits aren't pretty.


Things I'd Rather Drink Vomit Than Watch:

"Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen"-Michael Bay should be put on trial for crimes against humanity. It depresses me to think that parents might take their kids to see this shit when they could take them to see Up, instead.

"Bruno"-I don't know. I thought Borat was funny, very funny actually, but something about Sasha Baron Cohen feels one-trick pony to me. This new film looks awful.



Coming Up:

"500 Days Of Summer"-I'm in love with Zooey Deschanel. If you know her, tell her. The trailer to this is terrific. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of my favorite up and coming actors (if you haven't see Brick, you should), and waching Zooey charm him and then break his heart seems like a good way to spend a hot July afternoon.

"GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra"- Joseph Gordon-Levitt is also in this. Hey, a man has to eat. I understand. But I can't give my money to this thing.

"Inglourious Basterds"-It's a funny thing: I never like Tarantino's trailers, and I always like his films. This spaghetti western meets the Dirty Dozen flick is thus far holding true to form. The trailer is less than appetizing, but I can't wait to see the film. Part of my enthusiasm comes from having read the first few pages of the script, which are pretty damn great.

And Looking Forward:

"Shutter Island"-This new Scorsese flick looks like a maybe. It has a tense trailer, but DiCaprio looks...goofy, like a kid playing dress up. I haven't been a big fan of his work with Scorsese, either. The Departed was a good thriller (though Scorsese should have reined in Jack), but Gangs of New York was saved only by Daniel Day-Lewis. The Aviator is a film that becomes worse and worse the more you know about what a misogynistic asshole Howard Hughes was in real life. That film is a glorification of a real world-class shithead.

"Surrogates"-Another maybe. This sci-fi mystery stars Bruce Willis and has a neonoir feel to it. The trailer has a lot of explosions--a bad sign--but it also has a intriguing set-up: a future world in which no one leaves their homes is unbalanced when the first murder in years occurs and a cop must force himself to go out into the world. Agoraphobia meets 12 Monkeys?

"The Road"-Cormac McCarthy's novel is a masterpiece of coming-Apocalypse paranoia and father-son love story, but I'm skeptical about this adaptation. The trailer looks like a fundamental misunderstanding of McCarthy's text. Normally, I wouldn't lodge such a complaint--movies are not novels, after all, and filmmakers don't owe the author any fidelity--but this has "the book is a lot better" written all over it.

"Sherlock Holmes"-Nothing can ever match Jeremy Brett's interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. The BBC show in which he starred remains one of televisions authentic triumphs. The new movie from Guy Ritchie, alas, is a big budget action flick with lots of shit exploding. I'm more of a "quiet charms" man than a fan of kinetic action, but the film might find its own kind of charm. Here's the trailer for the movie.

A Report From Noir City DC

Yesterday I went to the AFI Silver (located in downtown Silver Spring, MD) to see a couple of the best noirs ever made. The films were part of a series the AFI is running called Noir City DC. The films they were showing were The Prowler by Joseph Losey and Raw Deal by Anthony Mann. I'm a big fan of both of these movies, but you rarely (i.e. damn-near never) get to see them in the theater.

The Prowler is a full-tilt masterpiece, a black-as-midnight story about an unhappily married woman named Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) who calls the cops after she spots a peeping tom outside her window. The cops show up to investigate, but unfortunately for Susan one of them is a charming rake named Webb Garwood (played by the congenitally underappreciated Van Heflin) who takes one look at her and decides she belongs to him. This film is a gorgeous piece of work, lovingly restored by the Film Noir Foundation, a nonprofit outfit that saves these beautiful old, largely forgotten crime flicks. The film isn't available on DVD, but bootleg versions are floating around out there and, of course, the FNF sponsors showings in different cities. Try to find it if you can. Losey's direction is subtle (we're never exactly sure what Webb's game is, though we're sure he has one), and the script by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo is a sophisticated piece of work that keeps getting more complicated as the film progresses. Both Susan and Webb continue to surprise us, their characters changing in relation to each other until the very end of the film. What, for example, does Susan want from Webb? It's hard to say--in many ways, she's as complicated as he is--but what's easy to say is how extraordinary Keyes is as Susan. Her performance here is exhibit A for my theory--born out by 99 River Street and The Killer That Stalked New York--that Evelyn Keyes was the most underrated actress of the 1950s.

The second film on the bill was Anthony Mann's Raw Deal. Mann is most famous today for his Westerns with Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, but among noir geeks he is generally considered one of the masters of the classic era crime flick. His work was heavy on ass-kicking (his rough-and-tumble movies are among the most violent in the genre, up there with Karlson and Fleischer) and they were also enlivened by the work of cinematograper John Alton. Here's another theory for you: Alton was the most important artist in noir. Bar none. No director, actor or actress was greater than Alton. His films will remind some newbies of Sin City, and it's clear to see his influence on Miller's original graphic novels as well as the film. Believe me, though, Alton is better. See Raw Deal--available on DVD--to see what I'm talking about. It's gorgeous piece of work, featuring Clarie Trevor and Marsha Hunt as two women in love with the same escaped convict (Dennis O'Keefe). The three leads are terrific and Mann's direction is brutal and immediate (he loved to move action up until it nearly touched the camera lens). Alton's lighting is stark and gorgeous, no one did high contrast black and white like this guy, and his work is here is among his best (He Walked By Night, T-Men, and the imperfect-though- underrated I, The Jury). If all that isn't enough, the movie also features perhaps Raymond Burr's best villain performance.

The program yesterday also featured introductions to the films by Foster Hirsch and Eddie Muller. Hirsch is the author of a terrific noir book called The Dark Side of the Screen as well as the biography of Otto Preminger, one of the genre's great practitioners. He's a semi-regular at the AFI. I saw him introduce Preminger's Fallen Angel and Angel Face.

Eddie Muller is a hero of mine, a great author and a hell of a activist. He wrote the single best--and certainly the most entertaining overview--of film noir out there, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, as well as Dark City Dames a collective biography of Evelyn Keyes, Ann Savage, Marie Windsor, Colleen Gray, Audrey Totter and Jane Greer. He's also the author of a couple of good noir novels and the director of a short film called The Grand Inquisitor, which was screened after Raw Deal (it's a fun piece of business featuring a creepy performance by Marsha Hunt). His most important work, however, might be as a preservationist of classic film noir. He's the founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation. I got to speak with him before the showings, and he told me that he felt chief job was to be an advocate for these films, struggling to get the studios to see the goldmine they had in their vaults. I asked about Too Late For Tears--a personal obsession of mine and one of the very best noirs ever made--and he said it was next of FNF's list of films to restore. That means that you and I might one day get to see Liz Scott's best movie projected in a theater. This is due to the efforts of Eddie and his organization.

To learn more about the Film Noir Foundation (including how to lend support) check out their website:

http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/


Quite honestly, this festival, which started Oct. 17th has exceeded my expectations. They had Farley Granger in town to attend the showing of Strangers on a Train, screened the incomparable Detour (not a great print unfortunately, but still...), showed Mann's great Side Street, and unleashed Tomorrow is Another Day, a Steve Cochran thriller which is obscure even by noir standards. They also showed a couple of overrated classics, Double Indemnity and They Live By Night. All in all, the festival has been a raging success, and still to come are Kiss of Death and Night and the City.

If you live in the DC area, you owe it to yourself to try to make it out to the remaining days of the festival. The AFI is the best theater in the country, and their presentation of these great films is topnotch (the pristine print of Raw Deal was on loan from the Library of Congress). In his closing remarks about the festival, Eddie referred to it as the "first" DC Noir. That's a good sign. Maybe next year we'll get some Liz Scott.