Last night I had a great time at Noir City, the 10th annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival. Noir City is spearheaded by the film noir expert Eddie “The Czar of Noir” Muller. Its website also includes top rate film noir resources and merchandise.
Last night’s program was a double feature that is not available on DVD. In fact, Universal went into its vault for the negative and made what is now the only print of Naked Alibi (1954) for this screening. Naked Alibi features Gene Barry as a seemingly regular guy with a violent and unpredictable temper. Sterling Hayden is a cop from the “I’ll beat a confession out of him” school of law enforcement; Hayden’s obsession, without any apparent empirical basis, is that Barry is a cop killer. They both vie for Gloria Grahame, a sexy saloon singer with a heart of gold.
Film noir is dependent on its femme fatales and Gloria Grahame may be my all-time fave. Many of you remember her as the slutty Violet in It’s a Wonderful Life and as Bogie’s co-star in the drama In a Lonely Place. The fact that Gloria was a Bad Girl in real life doesn’t hurt. I thank Mark A. Clark and his great blog Film Noir Photos for the great photo above.
The second film was Pickup, a lively and cynical low budget indie from 1951. The writer/director Hugo Haas made several of these films in the early 50s. As usual, in Pickup, Haas stars as the middle aged sap in the thrall of a young hottie. Two things make Pickup an absolute howl. First, Haas loses his hearing; when he unexpectedly recovers his hearing, he doesn’t let on that he can hear his trashy young wife and her beau plot to kill him for his money. Second, Beverly Michaels plays the femme fatale so broadly, creating one of the most unashamedly selfish characters in screen history – a floozy totally devoid of empathy. Only Ann Savage in Detour was a nastier noir villainess.
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