So you think you know everything there is to know about film noir? You’ve admired the lazy swagger of Robert Mitchum. Been seduced by the sexy insolence of Lauren Bacall and the hard-bitten voluptuousness of Joan Bennett. Chortled at the clownish incompetence of Elisha Cook Jr. or been repelled by the reptilian face of William Talman, sweating in the desert heat.
However, the three cinematic aficionados taking part in the series “In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City”—June 6 through July 24 at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive—have thought longer and harder on the subject than practically anyone alive. Now they’re sharing their thoughts as part of a 12-film retrospective that amounts to a noir master class.
The “visiting professors” are led by Imogen Sara Smith, the critic and author who has lent her expertise to the Film Noir Foundation’s Noir City e-magazine as well as to the foundation’s annual traveling film festival of the same name. The Archive’s Susan Oxtoby curates the BAMPFA series, which is based on Smith’s book and also titled In Lonely Places. The book contains Smith’s critical studies of more than 100 noirs, all taking place outside the usual urban locations. Those settings are every bit as lonely and alienating as the big-city streets, saloons and bedrooms that noir’s out-of-luck characters are forever trying to escape.
Backing up Smith by personally introducing and commenting on select titles are Alameda resident Eddie Muller, a.k.a. the Czar of Noir, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation and host of Noir Alley on TV’s Turner Classic Movies; and film historian David Thomson of San Francisco, author of innumerable volumes including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.
Director Lewis Allen’s Desert Fury (1947) may not be as ubiquitously analyzed as Detour (screening June 25) or Touch of Evil (July 12), but it’s a sizzler. In a small Nevada town somewhere on the outskirts of Douglas Sirk territory, a newly arrived gangster (John Hodiak) and his faithful sidekick (Wendell Corey) are intent on taking over the casino empire of the gangster’s ex-squeeze, domineering businesswoman Mary Astor. Crowding into this antsy frame are the Astor character’s spoiled, on-the-make daughter (Lizabeth Scott, radiant in Technicolor) and the town’s lusty sheriff (Burt Lancaster). Everyone is on the rebound in one way or another.
Eddie Muller has suggested that Desert Fury may be the world’s first gay noir—perhaps on the basis of Hodiak and Corey’s bitchy housekeeping arrangements. But is Muller forgetting James Mason and Martin Landau in North by Northwest? Regardless, Desert Fury is more fun than a barrel of gila monsters. It plays June 7, with critic Smith in attendance.
Speaking of Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense’s ironic family portrait, Shadow of a Doubt, screens June 14 under the watchful eye of curmudgeonly commentator Thomson. He also hosts a July 2 showing of Nicholas Ray’s luminescent desperado romance They Live by Night (1948), with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell as shoot-’em-up stand-ins for Bonnie and Clyde.
Muller walks away with the retrospective’s two must-sees. His commentary on the 1947 version of Nightmare Alley, a carnival of gaudy despair with Tyrone Power out-geeking all challengers as the eternal doomed hustler, takes place at BAMPFA on July 18. And then like a splash of cold water comes Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story (1955), a sordid expose of America’s other national pastimes: racism and corruption (July 24).
Smith returns to host director Raoul Walsh’s tale of an Old West intra-family feud, Pursued (1947), starring Robert Mitchum as the odd man out. It may not be a strictly “Freudian Western,” but it’s a long way from a double-crossing cops-and-robbers yarn—courtesy of writer Niven Busch. A trifle phlegmatic, with Mitchum displaying all the vulnerability of a Montgomery Clift as the black sheep of a loathsome ranching clan. Spectacular camera work by the great James Wong Howe. June 8.
Info: BAMPFA.org.
