Rants and Ruminations

NOIR CITY 2019 is here

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Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea in THE BURGLAR

The Noir City film fest, always one of the best Bay Area cinema experiences, opens this weekend in San Francisco. Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller. The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and movies not available on DVD or streaming. And we get to watch them in a vintage movie palace (San Francisco’s Castro Theatre) with a thousand other film fans.

Eddie Muller, whom you should recognize as the host of Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley series, has programmed this year’s version as NOIR CITY Reveals the Dark Side of Mid-Century America.  The tagline is “Think the 1950s were buttoned-down and conservative? Think again.”  Trench coats and fedoras are not required (and no smoking, please), but, other than that, you’ll get the full retro experience in the period-appropriate Castro.

You can’t stream three of the very best films in the fest: Nightfall, Pushover and Blast of Silence.  And Trapped, The Well, The Turning Point, The Scarlet Hour and Murder by Contract are pretty much impossible to find in any format.  So, see it here or don’t see it at all.  Trapped has just been restored by the Film Noir Foundation.  This year’s program features eight movies on The Movie Gourmet’s list of Overlooked Noir.

Allen Baron in BLAST OF SILENCE

My personal favorites on the program:

  • Two underrated noir masterpieces on the same double bill: Nightfall and The Burglar. Nightfall features smoldering chemistry between Aldo Ray and Anne Bancroft as they hunt for hidden loot while on the run themselves. The core of The Burglar is the stellar lead performance of Dan Duryea as a tortured and worn-out guy – with one deep loyalty. There are plenty of noir moments – lots of shadows, uplit faces in the darkness, amoral, grasping characters and not one, but two noir vixens – Jayne Mansfield and Martha Vickers.
  • The cop-yields-to-temptation double feature with Pushover and Private Hell 36. Tracking a notorious criminal, the cop (Fred MacMurray) in Pushover, follows – and then dates – the gangster’s girlfriend (“Introducing Kim Novak”) as part of the job, but then falls for her himself. He decides that, if he can double cross BOTH the cops and the criminal, he can wind up with the loot AND Kim Novak. (This is a film noir, so we know he’s not destined for a tropical beach with an umbrella drink.)
  • Another double feature, pairing the down-and-dirty Kiss Me Deadly and Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking Killer’s Kiss.
  • Sam Fuller and James Shigeta breaking ground by normalizing a Japanese-American protagonist in The Crimson Kimono.
  • The closing double feature with Sam Fuller’s brutal Underworld USA and that most emotionally bleak transition into neo-noir, the proto-indie Blast of Silence, which I’ve described as “a cauldron of seething hatred“.

Noir City runs from Friday, January 25 through Sunday, February 3. To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here. I’ll be there myself on this Friday and Saturday.

Verna Bloom

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Verna Bloom in THE HIRED HAND

Actress Verna Bloom, who died last week, didn’t make a lot of movies, but she starred in some of the most memorable movies of the 1970s. Her run began with Haskell Wexler’s groundbreaking Medium Cool and traveled through Clint Eastwood’s mysterious High Plains Drifter. She will be best remembered  as Mrs. Dean Wormer in Animal House.

My favorite Verna Bloom movie was also her favorite – Peter Fonda’s grievously underrated Western The Hired Hand. Bloom plays a woman abandoned on her hardscrabble ranch by her roaming husband (Fonda). When he returns with his trail buddy (Warren Oates), she will only allow him back as a hired hand. It’s a moody and captivating film, beautifully shot by Vilmos Zsigmond.  The Hired Hand is available on DVD from Netflix; the DVD is also available for purchase.

Verna Bloom in ANIMAL HOUSE

Happy Anniversary to The Wife

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Donna Reed in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE – the second best wife ever

Happy Anniversary to The Wife, also known as Lisa The Love of My Life!

Once again, she tolerated my spending huge chunks of time at Cinequest, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Noir City, the SF Jewish Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival.

We shared some of my favorite movie experiences this year.

  • In early October, she accompanied me to the Mill Valley Film Festival screening of Roma with the lead actresses and two of the producers in attendance – perhaps my best movie night of 2018.
  • Together, we loved A Star Is Born,  BlacKkKlansman and One Voice, (and together we had a meh reaction to First Man).
  • She tagged along for Man Who Cheated Himself at Noir City and Venus at Cinequest.
  • We power-binged through seasons of Victoria , Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and The Fall.
  • And we finished the year with the Christmas Eve screening of It’s a Wonderful Life at the Stanford Theater.

She’s the biggest fan and supporter of this blog, and I appreciate her and love her. Happy Anniversary, Honey!

2018 Farewells – in front of the camera

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Peggy Cummins, who died at age 92, was an English actress known for that most American of roles, a pretty gal who gets a sexual thrill out of gun violence.  That was in 1950’s Gun Crazy, a low budget B movie that has become a film noir cult classic.

In dismissing the movie, one contemporary critic wrote, “Looking as fragile as a Dresden doll, Miss Cummins bites into her assignment like a shark.”  If you watch the famous 3-minute shot of the bank heist from the back seat of the getaway car, wait for the moment John Dall asks Cummins to look back for pursuers – when she turns to look, she presses up against him and her face reveals an excitement that is both sexual and predatory.  By all accounts a delightful person, Peggy attended a Film Noir Foundation event in San Francisco in 2013. And she could eat a hamburger, too.

 

Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart in THE BIG SLEEP

Actress Dorothy Malone has died at age 93. She began making films in 1943 with a series of small parts, of which the most indelible came in 1948’s The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart. Malone plays a bookstore clerk who takes a liking to Bogie’s Sam Spade and initiates a quickie. As has been noted by many, it’s one of the sexiest moments in cinema and all she takes off is her glasses.

 

Stéphane Audran in LE BOUCHER

Actress Stéphane Audran was best known for best known for the surreal Buñuel masterpiece The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and the art house hit Babette’s Feast (scroll down from link).  But her best performance may have come in her husband Claude Charbol’s 1970 serial killer classic Le Boucher; she plays a teacher in a small village who is courted by the local butcher who may be the serial killer.  Audran brought a singular austere beauty and dignity to her roles.

 

Susan Anspach in FIVE EASY PIECES

Actress Susan Anspach starred in some of the most audacious films of the 1970s, most notably Five Easy Pieces.

 

Actor David Ogden Stiers will always be remembered as Major Charles Emerson Winchester III in TV’s M*A*S*H* . Stiers’ voice was often heard in the movies, such as when he narrated THX 1138 and voiced Cogsworth the clock in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

 

The actress Margot Kidder starred in the extremely popular Superman franchise and The Amityville Horror. More impressively to me, she rebounded to amass over fifty screen credits after her very public breakdown from bipolar disorder.

 

The actress Barbara Harris is best remembered for the memorable finale of Robert Altman’s masterpiece Nashville, where her seemingly loser character Albuquerque takes advantage of her one big break. She also got the most out of what is usually a thankless role, the scorned wife, in The Seduction of Joe Tynan. In Freaky Friday, she was the mom involuntairly switchng bodies with her teen daughter Jodi Foster. And she shone in Peggy Sue Got Married, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Who Is Harry Kellerman yada yada – remember, comedy is hard.

 

Scott Wilson with Ashley Judd in COME EARLY MORNING

Character actor Scott Wilson’s 81 screen credits spanned from Robert Blake’s partner in 1967’s In Cold Blood to the role of Sam Braun, the casino owner dad of Katharine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) in CSI. My favorite Scott Wilson role was as Ashley Judd’s father in the alcoholism drama Come Early Morning.

 

Burt Reynolds in DELIVERANCE

I’m gonna miss Burt Reynolds – both for being a movie icon and for being one of the greatest guests ever on Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He solidified that icon status in Deliverance, brandishing a bow-and-arrow and clad in a sleeveless neoprene vest – there has never been a more studly image in the history of cinema.

The key to Burt Reynolds’ appeal is that unique combination of virility and charm, his stunning physicality leavened by his not taking himself too seriously. I’m ridiculously handsome, and isn’t that just ridiculous?

To celebrate Burt’s rollicking Smokey and the Bandit era, I recommend The Bandit, a documentary about Burt’s collaboration with stuntman/director/roommate Hal Needham. You can stream The Bandit from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

In his last film, this year’s The Last Movie Star, an aged action movie star (Burt Reynolds playing someone very similar to Burt Reynolds) examines his life choices. It’s very funny and sentimental (in a good way), and you can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

2018 Farewells – behind the camera

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Anne V. Coates’ greatest cut in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA from this

Anne V. Coates’ greatest cut in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA into this

The pioneering film editor Anne V. Coates won an honorary Oscar after being Oscar-nominated five times. She cut Lawrence of Arabia, The Elephant Man, Chaplin, Erin Brockovich, The Eagle Has Landed and the underrated Unfaithful and Out of Sight. She worked with directors David Lean, Carol Reed, Richard Attenborough, David Lynch, John Sturges and Steven Soderbergh. Her first editing job was The Pickwick Papers in 1942 and her last was – at age 89 – Fifty Shades of Grey. In Lawrence of Arabia, when Peter O’Toole lights a match and blows it out, the match’s flame is cut into a magnificent desert sunrise; this has been called The Greatest Cut in cinema.

Among cinephiles, the prolific director Lewis Gilbert is probably best known for Michael Caine’s breakthrough picture Alfie (1966) and the art house hits Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine. But the versatile Gilbert also managed the Bond franchise’s transition from Sean Connery (You Only Live Twice) to Roger Moore (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker). In his autobiography, Gilbert explained, “Roger didn’t have Sean’s animal grace. However, he was at ease in light comedy. It therefore seemed to me much more sensible for Roger to play to the strength he had, rather than the one Sean had”.

Claude Lanzmann was the director of Shoah, a work eleven years in the making. Describing Shoah as a “Holocaust documentary” fails to capture its significance as a work of art and of history. Shoah consists entirely of testimony from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of the Holocaust, without any file footage or voiceovers. It’s over nine hours long, which is the longest film that any significant number of living humans has ever seen in a theater. I watched it on home video – not on a single sitting, but binging over a weekend. Its length has been criticized, but it’s only two hours longer than OJ: Made in America and three hours longer than The Best of Youth, both of which are eminently bingeable; I found the nine-hour viewing experience also imprints upon the viewer the vast scale of the Holocaust.

Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian writer-director, is most renowned for The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the 9-Oscar winner The Last Emperor (1987). The notorious Last Tango doesn’t hold up anymore, but I like Bertolucci’s latest work the best – The Dreamers and Me and You.

Cinematographer Robby Müller was endlessly groundbreaking. He pioneered use of fluorescent lighting in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend and then made the vast spaces of the Texas Big Bend country iconic in Wenders’ masterpiece Paris, Texas. He was also responsible for the one-way mirror effect in Paris, Texas’ pivotal peepshow scene. For better or worse, he jerked the handheld camera in Breaking the Waves. Müller gave a unique look to indie movies from Repo Man to Ghost Dog; The Way of the Samurai.

Penny Marshall was a front-of-the-camera star who moved behind the camera to direct. Forty years after Ida Lupino, this was still unusual; so, she was breaking ground for women working today. And without her, we woulnd’t have A League of their Own and “There’s no crying in baseball“.

Master screenwriter William Goldman adapted his own book for the sui generis and unforgettable The Princess Bride. His scripts included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man and Chaplin. “Follow the money” in All the President’s Men was Goldman’s line.

Shinobu Hashimoto, the screenwriter for Akira Kurosawa’s masterpieces of the 1950s and 1960s, died at the age of 100. Hashimoto’s FIRST credited screenplay was Rashomon, one of the most original screenplays ever. He also wrote the samurai classics Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and The Hidden Fortress, the humanistic drama Ikiru and the neo-noir thriller The Bad Sleep Well. Because of Seven Samurai, he also gets a credit for The Magnificent Seven and its remakes.

The master of the iconic movie poster, artist Bill Gold, died at 97. His first poster was for Casablanca. He followed that with hundreds of the most unforgettable poster images, including over thirty for Clint Eastwood movies alone.  Here’s his poster for Klute.

For each movie, somebody has to design the title sequence. The best was Pedro Ferro, whose work spanned from Dr. Strangelove to Napoleon Dynamite. Here is his work on Bullitt.

The Best Movies of 2018

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Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE< playing

It’s time for The Movie Gourmet’s Top Ten list for 2018. To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.

Between my number one and two choice, I could have gone either way. Here ‘s my Top Ten for 2018:

  1. Leave No Trace
  2. Roma
  3. The Rider
  4. Shoplifters
  5. The Other Side of the Wind
  6. A Star Is Born
  7. Green Book
  8. The Death of Stalin
  9. (tie) Beast and Custody
  10. BlacKkKlansman

The rest of the best of 2018 are:

  • Monrovia, Indiana
  • Three Identical Strangers
  • Quality Problems
  • Outside In

I would have included Bikini Moon and Barefoot if they were more widely available.

You can find fuller descriptions of these films and links to my posts about them (with images and trailers) at my Best Movies of 2018 page.

Yalitza Aparicio in ROMA

The Movie Gourmet joins the world of podcasts

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Sara and I disagreed about THE LAST MOVIE with Dennis Hopper

The folks at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club have dragged The Movie Gourmet into the Age of Podcast. In our podcast, Cinema Club co-director Sara Vizacarrondo and I reviewed the Cinema Club’s 2018 season and its two special events, the Bay Area premieres of Dark Money and The Last Movie.

Sara is a film teacher and film writer. We agreed (and twice disagreed) about Outside In, American Animals, We the Animals, Custody, Rodents of Unusual Size, Prospect and Styx, all of which I’ve written about. It was a very cool experience, and here’s our 42-minute podcast.

and we agreed about RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE

Bernardo Bertolucci

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THE DREAMERS

Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian writer-director, dies recently after making 25 films over 51 years. He is most renowned for The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the 9-Oscar winner The Last Emperor (1987). Bertolucci’s body of work benefitted from his longtime collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.

Of course, his most notorious film was Last Tango in Paris. I rewatched Last Tango in Paris in the last few years, and concluded that it just doesn’t stand up. In fact, I found parts of the vaunted Marlon Brando performance risible and, knowing what we know now about how Bertolucci and Brando treated actrees Maria Schneider, the famed butter scene is disturbingly unwatchable.

I actually prefer Bertolucci’s more recent work, beginning with the underrated The Sheltering Sky (1990) with John Malkovich and Debra Winger. I thought that his The Dreamers was the best film of 2003.

I especially like Bertolucci’s final film, Me and You which he made in 2012 at the age of 72. I saw Me and You at the San Francisco International Film Festival, but it has never been widely available, and sadly, can only be streamed with a Realeyz subscription.

ME AND YOU

Silicon Valley’s best Holiday movie experience

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Donna Reed and James Stewart in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Every Christmas Eve, the Stanford Theatre presents Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen.  It’s a great retro experience to see any film in an elegantly restored movie palace (balcony and all), especially with a Mighty Wurlitzer Organ pre-concert.  But sharing the laughs and tears of It’s a Wonderful Life with a large (I’m guessing about 750 seats), sell-out audience is very rich indeed.

The tickets are an egalitarian ten bucks or so, but you must be invested in the experience – you can only buy tickets IN PERSON at the Stanford Theatre box office.  The tickets go on sale with little fanfare in the first week of December and quickly sell out.  So you have to watch the Stanford Theatre’s website for the start of ticket sales and show up to buy tickets weeks ahead of time.  The unforgettable experience is worth it.

This year, advance tickets go on sale Friday, December 14 at 5:00 PM.  The Wife and I will be lined up at 4:30.

Ricky Jay

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DECEPTIVE PRACTICE: THE MYSTERIES AMD MENTORS OF RICKY JAY

Ricky Jay, the great magician, magic historian and collector, has died at age 72 after also making his mark in cinema. Jay appeared in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and a passel of David Mamet films, including the masterpiece House of Games. You can also find video of his performance Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants.

Jay’s development as a magician is traced in the documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, which explores the fascinating history of 20th century American magic. We get to see performances by Jay and his mentors, with comments by Jay himself. Ricky Jay’s mysteries were the secrets of 1) his illusions and 2) his family – both unrevealed. Whether expansive about his mentors and his passion for magic, or tight-mouthed about his relationship with his parents, Jay was a fascinating character.

Because the audience gets to see lots of amazing magic, Deceptive Practice is attractive as a performance film. But Jay was an unsurpassed raconteur, one of my all-time favorites, and when he held forth, it was as entertaining as any of his illusions.

I was fortunate to see Deceptive Practice at the San Francisco International Film Festival sitting amongst a bunch of real magicians. Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay is available on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.