GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935
Busby Berkeley (U.S. 1935) 98 min. With Dick Powell, Adolphe Menjou, Gloria Stuart.
The third in a series of four Gold Diggers musicals, 1935 is a Busby Berkeley affair. In his first solo outing as director, the famed choreographer crafted one of his most masterful numbers, “The Lullaby of Broadway,” in which an astonishingly endless parade of synchronized tap dancers showcases Berkeley’s visual artistry. He also proved adept at handling romantic comedy, here set at a swanky New England resort where a hotel clerk (Powell) falls for the daughter (Stuart) of a parsimonious millionairess.
Friday, September 4 at 2pm
GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM AND FILM NOIR
Professor Eric Faden gives an illustrated lecture about noir’s roots, as found in German Expressionism as well as exemplars of French and American silent cinema.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
Billy Wilder (U.S. 1944) 106 min. 35MM. With Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson.
James M. Cain’s torrid novel had been declared too hot for Hollywood’s Production Code Administration for a decade before Wilder willed the project past the censors—mainly by casting it as a morality tale. Stanwyck accepted the challenge of her nasty role, giving a knockout performance as the seductive murderess, and MacMurray broke from years of typecasting as an affable good guy to make insurance man Walter Neff one of the screen’s most cynical anti-heroes.
Friday, September 18 at 2pm
THE BIG COMBO
Joseph H. Lewis (U.S. 1955) 89 min. With Richard Conte, Cornell Wilde, Jean Wallace.
In a city of unsympathetic characters, a gangster (Conte) is hunted by a cop (Wilde) who is driven not by the law, but by his obsessive attachment to an ex-mistress (Wallace) – now a suicidal moll dating the ruthless criminal. In the film’s depiction of this romantic yet sadomasochistic relationship (as elsewhere), Lewis fought with Hollywood’s censorship board about violence and deviancy, much of which remains – whether on-screen, implied, or evoked by John Alton’s bold chiaroscuro cinematography.
TOP OF PAGE
Friday, September 25 at 2pm
KILLER’S KISS
Stanley Kubrick (U.S. 1955) 67 min. With Jamie Smith, Irene Kane.
A struggling New York boxer’ life is imperiled when he protects a beautiful nightclub dancer from her violent gangster boss in Kubrick’s low-budget second feature. The lovers try to flee town, a gritty NYC that the young director crafted from locations near his Greenwich Village home, utilizing meticulous compositions and a notably noirish lighting design.
TOP OF PAGE
Friday, October 2 at 2pm
THE BLUE DAHLIA
George Marshall (U.S. 1946) 98 minutes. 35MM. With Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, William Bendix.
Crime fiction legend Raymond Chandler fashioned this original screenplay for Ladd and Lake when the stars were at the height of their celebrity. Ladd plays a WWII vet who returns home to find an unfaithful wife – and is soon after the prime suspect in her murder. Lake is the wisecracking seductress who helps him try to prove his innocence.
THE HITCH-HIKER – Preservation Print!
Ida Lupino (U.S. 1953) 71 min. 35MM. With Edmond O’Brien, Frank Lovejoy, William Talman.
Two buddies’ set out for a Baja fishing trip, pick up the titular hitchhiker and quickly become his captives. Ida Lupino, an A-list Hollywood actress, pioneering filmmaker and the only woman to direct an American film noir, sets her thriller in the harsh Mexican landscape. There she stages the terrorization of two ordinary, middle-class businessmen by a maniacal serial killer – a twisted embodiment of anarchic masculinity and uncontrollable psychotic rage. Preserved by the Library of Congress.
TOP OF PAGE
Friday, October 23 at 2:05pm
MILDRED PIERCE
Michael Curtiz (U.S. 1945) 109 min. 35MM. With Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Zachary Scott.
Noir meets melodrama in Curtiz’ gripping adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel. In her signature performance, Crawford plays a woman in thrall to a femme fatale daughter (Blyth) whose love she cannot buy – a lesson learned too late, and not for want of trying. Indeed, as Mildred’s efforts grow increasingly desperate, the film hurtles toward the bad ending that opened the film, in classic noir form.
TOP OF PAGE
Friday, October 30 at 2:05pm
MURDER BY CONTRACT
Irving Lerner (U.S. 1958) 81 min. 35MM. With Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi.
A story about a steely professional hitman, Lerner’s crime movie came at the end of noir’s classic era and is credited for having “stood the visual language of noir on its ear by dragging it into the sunlight” (David Sterritt). Shot quickly on a microscopic budget, Murder by Contract made its mark in other significant ways: the film was a major influence on Martin Scorsese, who saw it as a teen-ager, admired its leanness and described it decades later as “an example of an American B movie that is 100 times better than the film it played with on a double bill.”
Friday, November 6 at 2:05pm
DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS
Carl Franklin (U.S. 1995) 102 min. 35MM. With Denzel Washington, Tom Sizemore, Jennifer Beals, Don Cheadle.
Denzel Washington stars in this neo-noir as Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a WWII vet turned private eye hired to investigate the disappearance of femme fatale Daphne Monet (Beals), the girlfriend of the favorite candidate in the L.A. mayoral race. Murders follow one step behind Easy on his trail to the truth, as genre conventions mix with mid-century realities of racial politics and passing in a mystery where nothing is as it seems.
TOP OF PAGE
Friday, November 13 at 2:05pm
STRAY DOG
Akira Kurosawa (Japan 1949) 122 min. 35MM. With Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Isao Kimura.
Kurosawa’s gritty buddy cop drama pairs a rookie detective (Mifune) who lost his pistol to a pickpocket with the seasoned Satō (Shimura). The duo pursue the gun and the elusive suspect who is using it in a string of crimes throughout Tokyo. Many of the elements that would eventually come to define Kurosawa’s distinctive visual and narrative style are already on display in this early partnership between the auteur and his long-time star, Toshiro Mifune.
TOP OF PAGE
Friday, November 20 at 2:05pm
BLADERUNNER – Director’s Cut
Ridley Scott (U.S. 1992) 116 min. DCP. With Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah.
Rick Deckard (Ford), a retired assassin of androids, is brought back on the police force to hunt down a new group of “replicants” masquerading as humans in a dark, dystopian Los Angeles. Hailed as one of the greatest science fiction films ever made, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a meditation on the nature of humanity, memory, empathy and identity, presented here in its definitive version.
