Category: News

New Criterion DVD: “The Furies”

The Furies (1950)

Criterion today released on DVD one of the great noir westerns, The Furies (1950) directed by Anthony Mann.

From the LA Times review by Dennis Lim:

In truth, “The Furies,” frontier setting notwithstanding, barely counts as a western. There are elements of film noir in both the plot and the look; many key scenes unfold under cover of darkness (Victor Milner earned an Oscar nomination for his moody cinematography). Above all, though, it plays like a Freudian melodrama, dissecting the hysterical and ultra-competitive love-hate relationship between widowed patriarch T.C. Jeffords ( Walter Huston) and his headstrong daughter, Vance ( Barbara Stanwyck).

From the NY Times review by Dave Kehr:

Mann gives the action a metaphysical dimension that overwhelms easy psychoanalytic readings. As in his films noirs (Raw Deal, Desperate), he systematically composes his shots to create a sense of instability, using lines of perspective or boldly massed foregrounds to pull the images off balance. The titanic struggle between father and daughter has knocked the world off its axis.

The Furies (1950)

Links:
LA Times Review by Robert Lim
NY Times Review by Dave Kehr
Criterion: The Furies
The New Yorker Review by Richard Brody
The House Next Door Review by Dan Callaghan

Rare Screenings at Fifth Annual Albuquerque Film Noir Festival

Repeat Performance

This year’s 5th Annual Noir Film Festival, which started Friday today at the Guild Cinema in Nob Hill, Albuquerque (3405 Central Ave NE  255-1848), features some rarely screened titles that should have local film noir fans very excited:

JUNE 20 & 21 (FRIDAY & SATURDAY):

The Hidden Room

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (3:00, 7:00)
Dir. Billy Wilder – 1944 – 107m

THE HIDDEN ROOM (a.k.a. OBSESSION) (5:10, 9:10)
Dir. Edward Dmytryk – 1949 – 96m – UK

JUNE 22 & 23 (SUNDAY & MONDAY):

REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT
The Original “Playhouse 90” Live Television Version (3:30, 7:00)
Dir. Ralph Nelson – 1956 – 90m

99 RIVER STREET (5:15, 8:45)
Dir. Phil Karlson – 1953 – 86m

JUNE 24 & 25 (TUESDAY & WEDNESDAY):

The Pretender

REPEAT PERFORMANCE (5:15, 8:30)
Dir. Alfred L. Werker – 1947 – 91m

THE PRETENDER (7:00 ONLY)
Dir. W. Lee Wilder – 1947 – 69m

JUNE 26 & 27 (THURSDAY & FRIDAY):

TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY (3:10, 7:00)
Dir. Felix E. Feist – 1951 – 90m

KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL (5:00, 8:45)
Dir. Phil Karlson – 1952 – 99m

JUNE 27 & 29 (SATURDAY & SUNDAY):

WIDMARK AND DASSIN
NIGHT AND THE CITY (2:30, 6:30)

ROAD HOUSE (4:30, 8:30)
Dir. Jean Negulesco – 1949 – 95m

JUNE 30 & JULY 1 (MONDAY & TUESDAY):

RARELY-SCREENED JOSEPH LOSEY
THE BIG NIGHT (5:30, 8:35)
Dir. Joseph Losey – 1951 – 75m

QUICKSAND (7:05 ONLY)
Dir. Irving Pichel – 1949 – 79m

JULY 2 & 3 (WEDNESDAY & THURSDAY):

CINEMATOGRAPHER JOHN ALTON IN TECHNICOLOR
SLIGHTLY SCARLET (5:00, 9:00)

JOSEPH LOSEY IN THE U.K.
THE CRIMINAL (7:00 ONLY)
Dir. Joseph Losey – 1960 – 97m – UK – Shown on digital video

JULY 4 & 5 (FRIDAY & SATURDAY):

CRY OF THE CITY (3:30, 7:05)
Dir. Robert Siodmak – 1948 – 95m

RARE SCREENING
CELL 2455, DEATH ROW (5:30, 9:05)
Dir. Fred F. Sears – 1955 – 77m


JULY 6 & 7 (SUNDAY & MONDAY):

RESTORED 35MM PRINT
THE BLACK BOOK (a.k.a. REIGN OF TERROR) (3:30, 7:00)
Dir. Anthony Mann – 1949 – 89m

STRANGE ON THE RANGE!
TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN (5:20, 8:45)
Dir. Joseph H. Lewis – 1958 – 81m

JULY 8 & 9 (TUESDAY & WEDNESDAY):

No Way Out

THE CRIMSON KIMONO (5:20, 9:05)
Dir. Sam Fuller – 1959 – 81m

RICHARD WIDMARK
NO WAY OUT (7:00 ONLY)
Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz – 1950 – 106m

Full details here.

filmsnoir.net: AMC TV Site of the Week

AMCTV.COM

I was recently interviewed by Christine Fall of AMCTV.com about FilmsNoir.Net and her write-up of our discussion has today been posted under the AMC Site of the Week banner.

Check out the article for some background on me and why I started FilmsNoir.Net.

8th Annual Palm Springs Film Noir Festival: Rare Screenings

The 8th Annual Palm Springs Film Noir Festival over May 29 – June 1, 2008 features a number of rare and obscure titles only available on the big screen. The festival will screen 12 features at Camelot Theatre, 2300 Baristo Road, Palm Springs Ca. – Telephone (760) 325-6565.

The program is a veritable feast of intriguing movies that have not been available for many years – two are so obscure I couldn’t find a poster:

The Killers 1964

Thursday May 29 7:30 pm – OPENING NIGHT
Special Guest: Angie Dickinson
The Killers (1964) 95m.
DIR: Don Siegel
Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, Clu Galager, Ronald Reagan

Remake of the Siodmak noir based on the Hemmingway short story.

The Chase

Friday May 30 10:00 am
The Chase (1946) 86m.
DIR: Arthur Ripley
Robert Cummings, Steve Cochran, Peter Lorre, Michele Morgan

A down-and-out roustabout (Cummings) is hired by a vicious gangster (Cochran) and quickly gets down-and-dirty with his lovely wife (Morgan). Restored 16mm print.

The Threat

Friday May 30 1:00 pm
The Threat (1949) 66m.
DIR: Felix Feist
Charles McGraw, Michael O’Shea, virginia Grey, Julie Bishop

Ruthless killer escapes prison, kidnapping the cop and D.A. who helped jail him while leading a wild escape into the California high desert. The action moves at a breakneck pace; a veritable highlight reel of malicious mayhem courtesy of ultimate noir baddie, CharlesMcGraw.

Friday May 30 4:00 pm
Special Guest: Margia Dean
Treasure of Monte Cristo (1949) 79m.
DIR: William Berke
Glenn Langan, Adele Jergens, Steve Brodie, Margia Dean

A freighter officer, (Langan) a descendant of the Count of Monte Cristo, is framed for murder and tries to puzzle it out. Shot on location in San Francisco and starring the husband and wife team of Langan and Jergens.

Lady in The Lake

Friday May 30 7:30 pm
Special Guest Jayne Meadows
Lady in the Lake (1947) 105m.
DIR: Robert Montgomery
Robert Montgomery, Lloyd Nolan, Audrey Totter, Jayne Meadows

Robert Montgomery offers a terse rendition of Philip Marlowe from an unusual first-person camera perspective via Steve Fisher’s screen adaptation of Chandler’s novel of the same title.

Saturday May 31 10:00 am
Smooth as Silk (1946) 64m.
DIR: Charles Barton
Kent Taylor, Virginia Grey, Jane Adams, MIlburn Stone

Respected attorney (Taylor) concocts a plot of vengeance after learning his sweetheart has jilted him for a wealthy producer.

Dead Reckoning

Saturday May 31 1:00 pm
Dead Reckoning (1947) 100m.
DIR: John Cromwell
Humphrey Bogart, Lizabeth Scott, Morris Carnovsky, William Prince

Bogart is a mustered out vet who heads down south searching for a buddy who took a powder on the Medal of Honor. He runs into big trouble with femme fatale Scott and gangster Carnovsky.

Man in The Vault

Saturday May 31 4:00 pm
Special Guest Karen Sharpe Kramer
Man in the Vault (1956)
DIR: Andrew V. McLaglen
William Campbell, Karen Sharpe, Anita Ekberg, Barry Kroeger

An innocent locksmith (Campbell) is seduced into participating in a robbery by femme fatale (Sharpe) to his eternal regret.

Bunny Lake is Missing

Saturday May 31 7:30 pm
Special Guest Carol Lynley
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) 107m.
DIR: Otto Preminger
Laurence Olivier, Carol Lynley, Keir Dullea, Noel Coward

Lynley and her brother report the apparent disappearance of her daughter from a British preschool. The only problem is Police Supt. Olivier can find no evidence that the girl existed.

Without Warning

Sunday June 1 10:00 am
Without Warning (1952) 77m.
DIR: Arnold Laven PRODUCERS: Arthur Gardner and Jules Levy

Professional gardener Carl Martin (Adam Williams) ably portrays a vicious psychopath with a thing for young blondes… and garden shears. One of the first Hollywood send-ups of the redoubtable serial killer, superbly crafted and almost never shown theatrically.

Talk About a Stranger

Sunday June 1 1:00 pm
Special Guest Billy Gray
Talk about a Stranger (1952) 65m.
DIR: David Bradley
George Murphy, Nancy Davis, Billy Gray, Lewis Stone, Kurt Kasznar

A compelling tale about a young boy, convinced his new neighbor poisoned his dog, which launches a quest for justice that careens out of control. Camera work by John Alton.

Night Editor

Sunday June 1 4:00 pm
Night Editor (1946) 66m.
DIR: Henry Levin
William Gargan, Janis Carter, Jeff Donnell, Coulter Irwin

Police detective (Gargan) can’t report a murder he witnessed because it would involve exposing an adulterous affair he was having with a socialite (Carter) with an overactive libido.

Appointment With a Shadow

Sunday June 1 7:30 pm
Appointment with a Shadow (1958) 73m.
George Nader, Joanna Moore, Brian Keith, Frank DeKova

While trying to score the lowdown on a big story, an alcoholic reporter becomes the target of a diabolical murder plot.

Get full program details from the Palm Springs Festival Film Noir site.

View the full size posters by clicking here: [piclens-lite-link]

Dalton Trumbo: Blast from the Past

A documentary, Trumbo (2007),  on HUAC-blacklisted screenwiter, Dalton Trumbo, who penned the noirs, The Prowler (1951) and The Brothers Rico (1957), opens in NY and LA on June 27. Scripted by Trumbo’s son, and based on letters from his father, this movie is said to be a highly emotive account of the years Trumbo spent in exile:

A number of celebrities take turns narrating from the script, including [Nathan] Lane, Paul Giamatti, Brian Dennehy, Donald Sutherland and others. As a visual accompaniment, the film intercuts home movie footage from the Trumbos’ lives, incisive interview material with Trumbo, his family, friends and collaborators; and haunting glimpses of the HUAC trial hearings with the Hollywood Ten, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; as well as extracts from The Sandpiper, Johnny Got His Gun, Spartacus and other productions authored by Trumbo. Peter Askin, who helmed the stage play, directs.

– Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Update 27 June 2008: In today’s NY Times Stephen Holder reviews Trumbo in an interesting article that looks basck at the dark days of the HUAC in the early 50’s:

Trumbo emerges as a fervently resolute, highly literate man of principle who, along with the other members of the Hollywood Ten, cited the First Amendment, protecting free speech, and not the Fifth, protecting self-incrimination, as his defense…If only the movers and shakers of Hollywood…  had stood together like the slaves in “Spartacus” and all claimed to have been Communists, the blacklist might have been averted. But they didn’t. Fear can make people instant cowards and informers. Resisting it may be the ultimate test of character. Today few would dispute Trumbo’s assessment of that very dark period: “The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil.”

New Book on Maverick Film-Maker Samuel Fuller

Shock Corridor 1963
Shock Corridor (1963)

Professor of film studies Wesleyan University, Lisa Dombrowski has just published The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You!.

In a press release Dombrowski said of Fuller:

His films are inherently fascinating. They’re designed to reach out and grab you. They’re provocative; they want you to respond emotionally and intellectually and sometimes even physically in an instinctual manner, as if someone has punched you in the face. He accomplished his goals in different ways. In the content, he discussed controversial issues of the time, race, gender, violence, critiques of America. Also, through their narrative structure, they emphasize conflict and contradictions, with dramatic tonal shifts that are jarring.

A book-signing and discussion of Fuller by Dombrowski will be held Thursday 24 April 2008 at 7:30 p.m. at the Goldsmith Family Cinema, 301 Washington Terrace, on the campus of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The signing will be held in conjunction with a screening of the 1955 Fuller thriller House of Bamboo.

Reviews of Samuel Fuller noirs on filmsnoir.net:

Pickup On South Street (1953)
The Crimson Kimono (1959): Little Tokyo Rift
The Naked Kiss (1964): Pulp Noir

Noir Novelists in Hollywood

Noir Novelists in Hollywood: An Overview
Free Seminar with Film Scholar James Naremore
Thursday, April 10, 2008 @ 6:00 p.m.
Chicago Public Library
400 S. State Street
312-747-1194

Scholar and film noir writer, James Naremore, professor emeritus of film studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, and author of More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, explores how the work of authors such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James Cain was adapted by Hollywood. This is a One Book, One Chicago event.

Charleton Heston Dead at 84

Touch Of Evil (1958)

Actor, Charleton Heston, died today. He starred alongside director Orson Welles in the last great noir of the classic cycle: Touch of Evil (1958).  Heston’s first role  was as a crooked gambler in the crime thriller cum noir Dark City (1950).

Jules Dassin (1911-2008): Rebel With a Cause

Night And the City 1950
Richard Widmark in Night and The City (1950)

Jules Dassin, one of the great noir directors, died in Athens overnight.

Born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1911, Dassin’s ground-breaking noirs of the late 1940’s rank among the great films noir:

Brute Force (1947)
The Naked City (1948)
Thieves’ Highway (1949)

A committed leftist, Dassin was blacklisted by the HUAC and left the US before the final cut of Thieves Highway was made. In London he made in 1950 Night and the City, another classic noir starring Richard Widmark, in perhaps his best dramatic role.

In Europe, Dassins’ attempts to work as a director were vengefully thwarted by Hollywood mogules until 1955, when penniless and in despair he was offered Du rififi chez les hommes (1955) [“Rififi”], which he crafted into the greatest french noir of the 50’s. Dassin also played the Italian safe-cracker in the picture. The movie, which featured the legendary 32 minute heist scene filmed in almost total silence, desevedly won him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where he met his second wife, the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, who died in 1994.

An interesting Salo.com interview with the 89-yo Dassin in August 2000 by Michael Sragow offers some background on Dassin’s attitudes to his early noir work.

Check out my reviews of Thieves’ Highway, Rififi and Night And the City.

His major noir releases are available as Criterion DVDs, and these essays on the Criterion web-site are elegant dissertations on Dassins’ artistry:

Brute Force: Screws and Proles by Michael Atkinson Here we are in the dark territories again, the republic of bitternesses and bile known as noir, squaring our jaws against an amoral universe and roaming the rain-wet, lightless American City as if it were a circle of the inferno where backstabbers, goldbricks, and unfortunates march in closed patterns and puzzle >>>

The Naked City: New York Plays Itself by Luc Sante In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book, published in hardcover—this at a time when photography books were still >>>

Night and the City: In the Labyrinth by Paul Arthur Within film noir’s unparalleled roster of resonant titles—Kiss of Death, Out of the Past, Where Danger Lives, to name three—none is more emblematic or iconographically cogent than Night and the City. Juxtaposing two of noir’s essential, virtually ontological qualities, the title of Jules Dassin’s underrated elegy for a self-annihilating hustler reminds >>>

Rififi: Love Made Invisible by Jamie Hook In 1955, Jules Dassin, an American director in exile in Paris, made this flat-out perfect piece of cinema. The film came as a redemption for Dassin: a one-time promising young director cranking out B-movies under an MGM contract (“They were awful. It was just plain unhappiness and embarrassment,” he later said >>>

Thieves Highway: Dangerous Fruit by Michael Sragow Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel and script by A.I. Bezzerides, Dassin made this swift, fluid melodrama >>>

Criterion Noir Essays

Night and the CityThis link will take you to a page listing the current catalog of Criterion Noir DVDs.

Of interest also is a link to an essay on each film in the catalog, including a lengthy article on Jules Dassins’ Night an the City (1950) by film essayist Paul Arthur, who passed away last week. Coincidentally, Night and the City stars Richard Widmark, who also died last week, and an article in this Weekend’s New York Times by Dave Kehr rates this as Widmark’s best picture.