It’s January, the most terrible time of the year! But for Bay Area movie buffs that means another stroll down some of cinema’s meanest alleys, a concrete and steel universe of endless shadows and impenetrable smoke.
Yes, it’s the 2019 edition of Noir City-San Francisco,the annual film festival founded and sponsored by the Film Noir Foundationand its founder, and master of ceremonies, Eddie Muller. It plays at gorgeous the Castro Theatre, San Francisco, starting Friday, January 25th and closes Saturday, February 2nd: twelve films over ten days.
This time, the festival fixes its gaze on noir films produced in the 1950s, when the genre was just at its peak before fading out of fashion. As in years past, it’s a jewel case of gems and oddities: a few premieres mixed with B-movie obscurities plus solid classics that bear repeated viewing.
Time and space allow me to see only a fraction of the program. Most of them I've seen before, some just recently, some not since I was a silver-faced tyke sitting cross-legged in front of the TV.
Of those unseen, I’d call the opening night feature, Trapped, starring Lloyd Bridges and directed by Richard Fleischer the most intriguing. Its plot sounds a bit batshit (a convicted counterfeiter released from jail and sent undercover), but there are two good reasons to see it.
One is Lloyd Bridges. You all know his sons Jeff and Beau, but their dad, your elders will also have you know, was a star back in Boomer days and a fine, well-respected actor who played mostly straight-arrow, second-tier leads, in the manner of other actors such as Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves and Robert Stack. He’s well remembered for playing Deputy Harvey Pell in High Noon, a role, it’s said, originally marked for Lee Van Cleef.
Lloyd Bridges achieved his greatest success in television: Probably his most famous role was as Mike Nelson in the TV series Sea Hunt, an underwater crime show that helped popularize scuba diving in the 1960s. (It inspired one of my older brothers to purchase scuba gear, which he never got to work properly, causing our mom’s blood pressure to swell to high triple digits: “I had you on bottom of the Hudson River!”)
Bridges spent the latter part of his career in television. He sprung to the spotlight once again in the classic 1980 spoof Airplane! Here, I assert, the sight of straight-arrow Lloyd Bridges sniffing glue while hanging upside down remains an inspired gag and a highlight of my long life at the movies.
The other reason to see Trapped is the direction of Richard Fleischer, who helmed the wonderful noir classic The Narrow Margin. Boomers remember Fleischer for directing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Disney and many other top Hollywood projects. (His best later film, to me, is the serial killer drama 10 Rillington Place, a superbly directed film.) Trapped is almost sure to feature some strong visuals from this master of noir.
As for the rest, I’d also like to see The Burglar, from a David Goodis novel, starring Dan Duryea. Goodis (author of Down There, aka Shoot the Piano Player) was a famously downbeat noir novelist and it would be interesting to see how closely the film captures his bleak view.
As for the known knowns, there’s a lot to see. Among them is one of three Sam Fuller films, Pickup on South Street. Here we’re graced with Richard Widmark as a Gotham pickpocket whose sticky fingers ensnare him in brutal Cold War intrigue. Widmark was a master at playing lowlifes—Night and the City, high among my favorite noirs, is great due partially to him. There’s also great work by Thelma Ritter as one of Widmark’s colleagues and, of course, director Fuller’s ultra-punchy style. (The festival also features Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono and Underworld U.S.A.)
I also recommend The Detective Story. From a play by Sidney Kingsley and directed by William Wyler, it’s social realism in the guise of noir. It follows a day in the life of a New York City precinct and its chief detective, Jim McLeod. It’s no Barney Miller, but a sad and distressing story of a veteran cop’s unravelling as the moral absolutes he lives by collapse in rubble.
William Wyler was not a noir director, but he was one of the master big studio directors of his time. His films are neglected, I think unfairly, by today’s critics for being “too establishment.”
Then there’s the performance of Kirk Douglas, an actor for whom, I’m sure, they coined the word “powerhouse.” Douglas dominates the screen like no other star, but he has a way of making us squirm. Even his noblest heroes seem arrogant bastards, making McLeod the perfect role for him. Douglas was a great movie star who bravely embraced singularly unpleasant roles. As we reach the end of the “difficult men” era in prestige TV (The Sopranos, Mad Men, etc.), remember that Kirk Douglas was there before any of them.
You might get a kick out of Angel Face, a 1953 melodrama directed by Otto Preminger and featuring Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons. Mitchum plays an ambulance driver who gets mixed up in Jean Simmons’ scheme to murder her wealthy husband. The story behind the film sounds more dramatic to me but stick around for a shocking fiery climax.
The festival also gets a revisit from that old 1950s noir warhorse, Kiss Me Deadly, up there with The Big Combo as one of the most florid, perverse and looniest noirs ever. Directed by Richard Aldrich, it stars Ralph Meeker (an underrated, underused actor) as Mickey Spillane’s brutal, granite-fisted hero, Mike Hammer. (Fun fact: Meeker replaced Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway and is said by some to have been the better Stanley.)
Also worth a ticket is Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) featuring terrific work from Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan and direction from Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Haunting). On the surface, it’s the story of a bank robbery gone wrong. Underneath there’s real drama in the racial conflict between the two leads, a misery still well with us. It’s a case where a film’s underlying themes actually are weaved within the drama rather than being forced upon it.
Of the two real classics that close the festival, it’s impossible to say which is “Best of the Fest”, but Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil is definitely one of them. So much has been written about this film, it’s hard to say anymore, but suffice it to say, if you haven’t seen it, see it now, and if you have seen it before, see it again!
One parlor game I never play is “What’s Your Favorite Alfred Hitchcock film?” because the Master made so many great films it’s impossible to decide. Psycho for one, stands among his greats not only for its direction, stark atmosphere, terrific score, editing, and acting, but also the underlying anguish in the colliding fates of Marion Crane and Norman Bates, which gives the film a hint of unexpected tragedy arising from pulp material. Knowing what’s to come, their final scene together is a sorrowful moment.
Everyone rightly mocks the penultimate scene (with poor Simon Oakland bravely wrestling through cornball Freudian speculations). It's my bet that if you cut that scene, you wouldn’t lose a thing and be left with a perfect movie in Psycho. The worst thing about it then becomes all the terrible imitations that have followed in its wake and still assault us sixty years on.
Thomas Burchfield is the author of Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller, which was praised as “incendiary” by David Corbett (The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday; The Art of Character)! His contemporary vampire novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil andDracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he also published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.
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