Noir City

TCM’s June feast of noir

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Humphrey Bogart in THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)

It’s more than a film fest, it’s a feast of film noir.

This June, Turner Classic Movies’ Friday Night Spotlight will focus on Noir Writers.  The guest programmer and host will be San Francisco’s Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation.  The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost.  It also sponsors Noir City, an annual festival of film noir in San Francisco, which often plays newly restored films and movies not available on DVD.  (My favorite part is Noir City’s Thursday evening Bad Girl Night featuring its most memorable femmes fatale.)

Muller (the Czar of Noir) has selected films from the work of noir novelists.  Friday night, he kicks off with films from the novels of Dashiell Hammett: the 1931 and more famous 1941 versions of The Maltese Falcon, plus the 1936 version (Satan Met a Lady) and After the Thin Man and The Glass Key.  (Muller informs us that Hammett pronounced his first name da-SHEEL.)

On June 14, Muller continues with the work of David Goodis, The Burglar, The Burglars, The Unfaithful, Shoot the Piano Player and Nightfall.  (You may have seen Goodis’ Dark Passage with Bogie and Bacall.)

On June 21, we’ll see films from the novels of Jonathan Latimer (Nocturne, They Won’t Believe Me) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice).

TCM and the Czar of Noir wrap up on June 28 with movies from the novels of Cornell Woolrich (The Leopard Man, Deadline at Dawn) and Raymond Chandler (Murder My Sweet, The Big Sleep, Lady in the Lake, Strangers on a Train).

These two movies aren’t part of the Friday night series, but on June 11, TCM features two of the nastiest noirs:  Detour and The Hitchhiker.

Set your DVR and settle in for dramatic shadows, sarcastic banter and guys in fedoras making big mistakes for love, lust and avarice.

Anne Bancroft and Aldo Ray in NIGHTFALL

Blogging from Noir City: It’s Bad Girl Night!

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Gloria Grahame with Director Jerry Hopper on the set of NAKED ALIBI

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.