Dry Ice Factory

The Noir City festival is playing at SIFF Theater, starting yesterday. I went to a double feature today. Eddie Muller was there to give a funny, insightful introduction and to talk about the Film Noir Foundation's growing empire, which is spreading next year to France, where (as Muller joked) noir was born. "At first they acted like there was nothing we could show them," he said, "but I convinced them that we have six films that have never played a theater in France." We applauded with nationalistic pride.

You know, there are cult-like aspects to film noir fandom. Shock horror, yeah right.

Both movies today were from 1947, one of the prime years of high noir, as Muller called it (as opposed to '50s noir, which wasn't so visually lush). First up was The Unsuspected, directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Claude Rains, Audrey Totter, and Constance Bennett. Any time you have Claude Rains in a movie, you know you're going to have at least *some* fun, but this was a very entertaining movie over all. It's more of a melodrama noir, although it's also a country house murder mystery of sorts. Muller claimed that the plot makes no sense, but it seemed more dreamlike than anything else, as though someone had plotted it in their sleep. It has great visual style, both shadowy and ethereal, with the camera frequently on the move, prowling the house. Cinematography by Woody Bredell, who also shot Phantom Lady (1944) and The Killers (1946). Constance Bennett gets some great Algonquin type zingers, although the one in the subject-line is spoken by the humor-relief butler. Great noir moment: a killer smoking on the bed in a dark hotel room, listening to a true crime thriller radio show recite one of his crimes as entertainment, while outside the window the neon Peekskills Hotel sign is truncated to a blinking KILL ... KILL ... KILL ...

The second film was Desperate -- a literal B-movie by the great Anthony Mann, from one of the greatest noir studios, RKO. I've seen a lot of Mann's movies, including Westerns as well as noirs, and I've loved most of them. He's a very powerful story-teller. Desperate, despite suffering from the low budget to a certain extent, still packs a punch. Like The Unsuspected, it combines at least a couple of different story types, although it mostly feels like a lovers on the lam story. The truck driver protagonist gets tricked into helping in a robbery, and he spends the rest of the short movie (73 mins.) trying to protect his wife from Raymond Burr and his gang of thugs. I'd had the impression that this was still journeyman work for Mann, and to a large extent it is. Still, it was a lot more interesting visually than I expected. The most famous scene is one in which the protagonist is viciously beaten off-screen while we see a hanging lamp swing around in an otherwise dark room. Pure visual poetry. The climax in the stairwell of a five-story apartment building is also beautifully composed and shot, emphasizing a spiral visual structure that seemed like pure Weimar. Muller made the point that a lot of the great noir of the '40s was by Europeans, including Curtiz, who was Hungarian, but Mann was an American absorbing the style.

So, that was good fun. There are way more films in the series that I want to see than I want to spend the time seeing, but I'm hoping to catch both films on Thursday too, Alias Nick Beale (1949) and Night Editor (1946), neither of which are on DVD as far as I know. That's the last night of this short festival.