10HTE: Michael Hawley

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2016. An index of participants can be found here.

Ten-time IOHTE contributor Michael Hawley runs the blog film-415.

2016 Favorite Bay Area Revival/Repertory Screenings

Blow Job screen shot from Music Box DVD of The Story of Film: An Odyssey

Blow Job (1963 USA dir. Andy Warhol)
Andy Warhol's Silver Screen: Rarities & Restorations, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

I expected to be bored, but instead found myself strangely captivated by this infamous Warhol silent in which the camera coolly observes the face – and only the face – of a young man (DeVeren Bookwalter) angelically lit from above, as he receives a titular off-screen BJ. Shot in high contrast B&W, the exquisite new 16mm print made it easy to savor the way light plays over the planes of his expressive and continually moving face. Eventually one notices how the eyes only become visible when the head tilts back and how his pouty upper lip remains perpetually hidden in shadow. After 25 minutes a pair of arms finally rises in sweet surrender, followed by five minutes of cigarette smoking. The End. On the same double-bill was My Hustler, a 1965 two-reeler gab-fest that benefitted greatly from its astoundingly clear audio. In the first section, a gay man and his fag hag neighbor dish the Dial-a-Hustler (Paul America) lounging on the beach below. Mr. America returns in reel two as he and another hustler (Joseph Campbell) shower, shave and preen whilst discussing the finer points of their trade. I was also lucky enough to catch Warhol's The Life of Juanita Castro (1965) and The Velvet Underground Tarot Cards (1966) as part of this YBCA series.

Hospital (1970 USA dir. Frederick Wiseman)
Frederick Wiseman Restorations: Three Confrontational Classics, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Although I found plenty to admire in Titicut Follies (1967) and High School (1969), both part of this 35mm restorations trio, it was Wiseman's riveting portrait of NYC's Metropolitan Hospital that really shocked my senses. I was particularly taken by the hospital staff's compassion and advocacy for their mostly low-income and indigent clientele – and I'm fully convinced it wasn't just an act for the camera. Inone memorably intense sequence, a staff psychiatrist valiantly pleads by phone with the city's Department of Welfare to obtain help for an underage African-American transgender prostitute.

Until the End of the World screen shot from Magnolia DVD of Steve Jobs: the Man in the Machine

Until The End of the World (1991 Germany dir. Wim Wenders)
Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road, Pacific Film Archive

While I really dug this dystopian road movie 25 years ago in its 158-minute iteration, there's even more tolove now in this gorgeous 4K restoration of Wenders' five-hour director's cut, shown at the PFA with a 30-minute intermission. The film's prescience is staggering, with automobile GPS, facial ID software and inter-personal video communication all part of its near-futuristic milieu.

Loulou (1980 France dir. Maurice Pialat)
Love Exists: The Films of Maurice Pialat, Pacific Film Archive

After seeing a reunited Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu in 2015's In the Valley of Love, it was grand going back 35 years to watch them in the prime of youthful magnificence. In Pialat's slice-of-life examination of class conflict, Huppert plays a young woman who leaves her priggish husband (Guy Marchand) for Depardieu's loutish ex-con. Favorite line: "I'd prefer a loafer who fucks to a rich guy who bugs me!"

Under Age (1941 USA dir. Edward Dmytryk)
I Wake Up Screaming (1941 USA dir. Bruce Humberstone)
The Girl and the Monster (1941 USA dir. Stuart Heisler
I Wake Up Dreaming, Castro Theatre

This line-up of trashy 1941 Film Noir – courtesy of esteemed, soon-to-be ex-San Francisco programmer Elliot Lavine – was THE triple-bill of 2016. In Under Age, two down-on-their-luck sisters fall into a scheme by which hitchhiking women coax businessmen to a chain of rest stops where they're swindled by waiting gangsters. Then in I Wake Up Screaming, a publicity agent is accused of murdering the waitress he's transformed into an A-list celebrity, with a fantastically menacing Laird Cregar as the police inspector out to frame him. I was surprised by a scene in which Betty Grable and Victor Mature hide out in a 24-hour "Adults Only" movie theater. I guess that was already a thing back in 1941? Then in the ultimate cake-taker The Girl and the Monster, a man about to be wrongly executed asks a scientist to transplant his brain into a gorilla so he can seek revenge against the mobsters who prostituted his sister. Yes, you read that correctly.

Multiple Maniacs (1979 USA dir. John Waters)

I hadn't seen Waters' first synch-sound film in over 30 years so this Janus Films 4-K restoration was a true like-a-virgin experience. So many things I had forgotten – Divine's hilariously fevered interior monolog in the church scene, the climactic chase through the streets of Baltimore, the re-enactment of Jesus' multiplying of loaves and fishes (canned tuna and trashy white bread). It was a special thrill seeing it in Alamo Drafthouse's main auditorium with Waters on hand to do the intro honors.

A Woman of the World screen shot from Janus DVD of The Love Goddesses

A Woman of the World (1925 USA dir. Malcolm St. Clair)
21st San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Castro Theatre

Of the 14 programs I caught at this year's SF Silent Film Festival, I had the most fun watching Pola Negri as a tattoo-sporting Italian countess scandalizing a small American hamlet. The image of Negri horsewhipping the local district attorney who wants to run her out of town is now lovingly seared upon my brain. Two additional SFSFF highpoints were Shooting Stars, which marked the debut of brilliant British director Anthony Asquith (A Cottage on Dartmoor), and René Clair's farcical The Italian Straw Hat.

The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1966 USA)
Castro Theatre

This miraculous 4K restoration of the Fab Four's legendary 35-minute Shea Stadium concert was a bonus feature at screenings of Ron Howard's new documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years. (The doc was concurrently streaming on HULU, minus the Shea concert). Thanks to its being shot with 14 cameras, the viewer experiences everything from the band's dazed sprint out onto the field, right up through their being whisked away by security post-concert. Most importantly, the songs can now be heard clearly over the stadium's 55,000 screaming fans. My favorite moment saw John and George convulsing with laughter while singing back-up on "I'm Down," the concert's final number.

So This is Paris (1926 USA dir. Ernst Lubitsch)
San Francisco Silent Film Festival's A Day of Silents, Castro Theatre

My fave silent film discovery of the year was this clever and breezy marital infidelity romp featuring four first-rate actors I'd never heard of and an orgiastic Charleston dance sequence that's gotta be seen to be believed. This one-day marathon of silent cinema goodness also featured Sadie Thompson with Gloria Swanson (who kept reminding me of Kristen Stewart!), the Alloy Orchestra accompanying Eisenstein's Strike, and the first-ever Oscar winner for Best Actor (Emil Jannings in 1928's The Last Command.)

Scarlet Street screen shot from Kino DVD

Scarlet Street (1945 USA dir. Fritz Lang)
Noir City 14, Castro Theatre

Edward G. Robinson gives a delicately sympathetic performance as a put-upon hubby and Sunday painter who gets mixed up with a prostitute (Joan Bennett) and her pimp boyfriend (Dan Duryea). It's easy to see why Fritz Lang considered this his favorite of the films he made in Hollywood. The movie wrapped up an impressive Saturday afternoon triple-bill that included 1944's The Lodger starring (once again) the great Laird Cregar as a surrogate Jack the Ripper, and 1944's Bluebeard featuring John Carradine as a women-murdering Parisian puppeteer. Noir City 14 also afforded me worthwhile revisits of Michael Powell's The Red Shoes and Peeping Tom, as well as Antonioni's Blow-Up.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Screen capture from Cinema Guild DVD of Los Angeles Plays Itself

WHO: Robert Aldrich directed this. It was his fifth feature film as a director, after a storied career as an assistant director on films like The Story of G.I. Joe for William Wellman, Force of Evil for Abraham Polonsky, and M and The Prowler for Joseph Losey.

WHAT: When I think of Kiss Me Deadly I always think of one of my mentors in cinephilia Damien Bona, who I met through an online film discussion forum about eighteen years ago, and (only once) in person thirteen years ago. He considered Aldrich's film not only the greatest of all films noir but also one of the ten greatest films of all time. Bona died in 2012 and a memorial website has republished a list of his 100 favorite films, as well as his top ten with commentary, in which he calls Kiss Me Deadly "Brutal, hilarious, groundbreaking and impudent. Both Aldrich's visual style and his send-up of American machismo are absolutely audacious. Irresistible." He wrote more on the film, and specifically about Cloris Leachman's first-ever film appearance, which happened to be in this film, in his book Opening Shots: The Unusual, Unexpected, Potentially Career-threatening First Roles that Launched the Careers of 70 Hollywood Stars, which I unfortunately do not have handy to quote. In a tome filled with embarrassing debuts, Leachman's stands out as one of the most fortunate beginnings ever to befall a future star. Kiss Me Deadly is indeed a spectacular film worth revisiting frequently.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at 8PM at the Castro Theatre

WHY: I don't want to give away anything about Kiss Me Deadly that might mar the experience for a first-time-viewer, but anyone who's seen it knows why it's the perfect choice for programmer Elliot Lavine's final double-bill at the Castro (along with the 1951 Arch Oboler post-apocalyptic thriller Five). If you hadn't heard by now, Lavine, an ace movie-selector best known for his longstanding relationship with the Roxie Theatre, but who had programmed regularly at other places including Auctions By the Bay, the California and the Castro, is moving to Portland. It was unsurprising that Mick LaSalle, in his recent article about Lavine's Frisco Bay departure, went so far as to call him our "last great programmer"; anyone who pays close attention knows that LaSalle favors Lavine's programming over all other local repertory. Though I consider the Chronicle headline an insult to a minimum of a half-dozen other local film bookers, there's no question that Lavine's particular style gelled particularly well with a certain portion of Frisco Bay cinephilia, and that his imaginative sensibility will be sorely missed.

Kiss Me Deadly was in 1999 inducted into the National Film Registry, the Library of Congress's annually-growing list of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" American moving image works. The range of films included on the list is impressively varied; that year also saw the induction of the 1914 ethnographic documentary In the Land of the War Canoes, the 1936 Chevrolet-sponsored short Master Hands, and, on its first year of eligibility, Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing as well as twenty-one other films from pretty much every era and mode of American filmmaking.

This Friday is the last day for the general public to submit its suggestions of films to enter the Registry in 2016. Anyone can nominate up to 50 different titles for potential inclusion on the registry. In the past I've sent my list in privately, but I see no reason not to share it on my blog this year. In fact, I even solicited suggestions from my twitter followers for titles they thought deserved induction this year, which I'd add to my list in exchange for their vote for a film that I feel particularly merits it: San Francisco beat poet Christopher Maclaine's 1953 experimental masterpiece The End (which prefigures Kiss Me Deadly in a few ways itself, come to think of it).

Without further ado, here are forty-nine of the fifty titles I plan to submit to the Library of Congress on Friday. If you want to follow my suit and nominate this whole slate, there's nothing stopping you! Or pick and choose titles you feel are worthy and add your own suggestions to the mix. I've reserved the fiftieth slot on my list for another suggestion (within reason) from one of my blog readers who agrees to vote for The End (1953), so leave a comment if you want to do that.

1. The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985). Clay animation pioneer Will Vinton is as yet unrepresented on the Registry list. One might argue for one of his shorts having a better shot at induction, but this feature film, with its astonishing "Mysterious Stranger" and delightful "Adam and Eve" sequences is my pick.

2. The Amazing Mrs. Holliday (1943). Deanna Durbin was one of the biggest stars of her era, and yet none of her films are on the Registry. This great one is set (for the most part) in San Francisco, and was mostly directed by an uncredited Jean Renoir, whose Hollywood years haven't been acknowledged on the Registry as yet either (his better-known French years are of course ineligible).

3. Beggars of Life (1928). Like Renoir, Louise Brooks is best known for her European career, which is surely why she hasn't been added to the Registry in its 26 years of existence. Unlike Renoir, she was a Kansas native whose absence seems shocking. This is my favorite of her American films.

4. Belfast, Maine (1999). I haven't seen this Frederick Wiseman documentary but one of my twitter followers vouches strongly for it and agreed to vote for The End (1953) if I included it in my submission. I believe Wiseman was the first documentarian to see two of his films (High School in 1989 and Hospital in 1994) enter the Registry, but hasn't had any new inductions since then.

5. Betty Tells Her Story (1972). Another twitter-follower suggestion I haven't seen, but this short directed by Liane Brandon sounds eminently fascinating and worthy of inclusion as "one of the earliest films of the modern Women's Movement".

6. Black Panthers (1968). I'm not sure this short documentary (sometimes known as Huey) directed by Agnès Varda while she was in the Bay Area is technically eligible, as it's generally considered a French film. But I believe it was shot entirely in Oakland and captures an important and still-relevant moment in American history. It screens with other Varda films on the opening weekend of the newly-expanded SFMOMA's just-announced inaugural film screening program. More on that on this blog later.

7. Blackie the Wonder Horse Swims the Golden Gate (1938). Another Frisco Bay non-fiction work, and another twitter-follower suggestion. This time it's one I've seen (projected in 16mm by Stephen Parr of Oddball Films) and it's also available on youtube.

8. Blow-Out (1981). To me, the single-most shocking absence from the National Film Registry, at least among living filmmakers, is Brian De Palma. I always include a few of his films on my submission lists. This one is surely one of his greatest and most haunting films.

9. Carlito's Way (1993). Other years I included the famous Scarface remake, but after seeing the director describe this as his best film in the recent De Palma documentary a few months ago, I feel it makes more sense to stump for this follow-up collaboration with Al Pacino. It would also mark screenwriter David Koepp's first appearance on the Registry.

10. Carrie (1976). My third and final De Palma suggestion this year. Such an important American social and aesthetic statement, and a huge commercial hit to boot. I'm a little shocked it hasn't been inducted before.

11. Christmas Holiday (1944). Another terrific Deanna Durbin picture, this one uncharacteristically somber and adult, belying its sweet-sounding title.

12. The Dot and the Line (1965). Possibly the best cartoon made by Chuck Jones after he left the Warner Brothers studio for MGM, this was another twitter-follower suggestion.

13. The End (1953). One of the greatest films of all time, according to me and a few other people. I talked about it on the Cinephiliacs podcast last year.

14. The Fall of the I-Hotel (1983). This documentary about San Francisco's history of eviction and protest, as crystallized in one landmark battle on the edge of Chinatown, is probably the best film I've seen as part of a project I've participated in over the past year and a half going through the San Francisco Public Library 16mm collection. I wrote the note for it here. Our next screening, incidentally, is Alain Resnais's Night and Fog on September 13; I also wrote this program note.

15. Fragment of Seeking (1946). Curtis Harrington is another figure absent from the Registry thus far. I might pick one of his later, more commercial features like Night Tide, but this early short, which may beat out Kenneth Anger's 1947 Fireworks as a gay filmmaker's avant-garde debut, seems more "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

16. A Girl In Every Port (1928). Another option for a Louise Brooks film, it would also become the first silent-era Howard Hawks film on the Registry.

17. The Good Bad Man (1916). I'm not sure why no film directed by the prolific and highly influential Allan Dwan has made it onto the Registry in 26 years. I'm not sure this little-known early Douglas Fairbanks Western is the most likely of his films to become inducted, but it's wonderful and would be a great choice in my opinion, especially in its centennial year.

18. Heaven's Gate (1980). In the year that director Michael Cimino died, I think it would be a particularly fitting tribute for his notorious but masterful third feature film to finally enter the Registry (The Deer Hunter was inducted way back in 1996). Bonus: A great Isabelle Huppert performance would be entered as well.

19. High-Diving Hare (1949). Chuck Jones, Robert Clampett, Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin are all represented in the National Film Registry. (Jones, at least, has multiple films inducted.) This leaves Friz Freleng as the most major of the "Termite Terrace" animation directors without a film on the list. This Bugs Bunny cartoon is my personal favorite of his films, and would also mark Yosemite Sam's first appearance.

20. It Started With Eve (1941). My third and final Deanna Durbin suggestion this year (I'd include His Butler's Sister as well except that a Frank Borzage-directed film was inducted last year). A magical romantic comedy also starring Charles Laughton, it's probably the most characteristic of her great films I've seen so far, and would be an ideal "populist" choice.

22. The Lady of the Pavements (1929). Mexican-American star Lupe Velez is another figure thus-far left out of the Registry. Her starring role in this late D.W. Griffith silent film is perhaps her best showcase.

22. M (1951). Joseph Losey is another American (Wisconsin-born) whose Hollywood career was interrupted (in this case by McCarthyism) but who is too important a figure to be missing from the Registry entirely. I'm probably one of the few people who actually slightly prefers his Los Angeles remake to Fritz Lang's Berlin classic original, but I don't think it's outlandish to put it forth for posterity in this way. 

23. The Man Who Laughs (1928). Though German-exile star Conrad Veidt does appear on the Registry in his most famous talking role, as a villain in Casablanca, this heroic role would be a wonderful addition to the list. Fellow emigre Paul Leni only directed a few films in Hollywood but this is a great one and would be an ideal entry to the NFR.

24. Matewan (1987). This is another twitter-suggestion that I (shamefully) have yet to see for myself. But I understand it's one of the great dramatizations of political history made in my lifetime. It would only be director John Sayles' second film on the Registry, after his debut Return of the Secaucus 7 was inducted in 1997.

25. Mikey & Nicky (1976). There's no denying that Elaine May is a national treasure. So it's strange that she's almost completely missing from the National Film Registry- unless her walk-on role in The Graduate (inducted in 1996) and her uncredited writing on Tootsie (inducted in 1998) count. I'm putting forth a couple of her films as writer-director on my suggestion list this year. Mikey & Nicky is my personal favorite of her films.

26. Murder in the Rue Morgue (1932). French-American director Robert Florey is not the most respectable of Hollywood auteurs; he was extremely prolific but mostly in B-pictures. But he deserves a slot in the Registry and this Bela Lugosi-starring Universal horror movie feels like his best shot. I love it.

27. A New Leaf (1971). My other Elaine May suggestion is perhaps more likely as a debut induction since it's a) a comedy, the genre which she's best known for and b) features her tremendous acting skill as well.

28. Nitrate Kisses (1992). Barbara Hammer's absence from the National Film Registry grows more glaring with each passing year. I'm not sure if this extremely moving film, which features nudity of a decidedly non-pornographic nature, is the most likely of hers to gain her entry to the list, but I'd love to see it inducted.

29. Paris Is Burning (1990). Jennie Livingston's documentary on the New York City "ball" scene perhaps most famous for inspiring Madonna's "Vogue" video has been frequently mentioned by others as a prime candidate for NFR inclusion, and I'll happily join this campaign.

30. Pigs Is Pigs (1937). Another Friz Freleng cartoon suggestion. This one features perhaps the most sinister and harrowing situation ever shown in a mainstream animated short.

31. Pomo Shaman (1964). A documentary record of shaman Essie Parrish doing her healing ceremony in California. Beautifully made by photographer and filmmaker William R Heick with assistance from anthropologists David W Peri and Robert Walter Wharton, and from cinematographer Gordon Mueller. It should be available to view here.

32. The Prowler (1951) My "other" Joseph Losey suggestion this year, in case M seems too off-the-radar. This gripping and socially conscious noir is available in a terrific restoration from Frisco Bay's own Film Noir Foundation. Either choice puts another Robert Aldrich-assistant-directed film onto the Registry, joining the Wellman and Polonsky films mentioned at the top of this post.

33. Reflections of Evil (2002). I have no real expectation that a Damon Packard film, much less one as brilliantly twisted as this, might make it to the Registry. But I have to try.

34. Retrospectroscope (1996). Even if acclaimed filmmaker Kerry Laitala wasn't my girlfriend I'd think this mesmerizing 16mm film based on a paracinematic sculpture of the same title merited any marker of posterity; I saw it well before we started dating anyway. I'm sure I'm not the only one voting for a friend's film. Anyway, it's screened at many festivals and micro cinemas and is discussed thoroughly in 2013 book Speaking Directly: Oral Histories of the Moving Image.

35. Rich Kids (1979). 91-year-old Robert M, Young has writing credits on two Registry inductees, Nothing But A Man (inducted 1993) and To Fly! (inducted 1995). But no film he's directed has made it on the list. This beautifully-observed view of teenagehood would make a fine addition, in my opinion.

36. Rumble Fish (1983). Another twitter-follower suggestion, and one I'm particularly pleased to follow. Director Francis Ford Coppola has seen four films enter the Registry, but none since Apocalypse Now was entered in 2000, all from the 1970s, and none featuring this Stewart Copeland score and this cast. Phenomenal.

37. Rushmore (1998). Also a twitter-follower suggestion I can really get behind. It's the first Wes Anderson film I (and many others) ever saw back when it was released, and it's still in many ways my favorite. Definitely my pick to be Anderson's debut NFR entry.

38. Sherlock Holmes (1916). This one's more "culturally, historically" than "aesthetically" significant, but it really is the former, as the only filmed record of William Gillette, in his day the definitive performer of the famous Arthur Conan Doyle character on stage. It was considered lost for nearly a century before re-debuting at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival last year.

39. Silver Lode (1954). My final twitter-follower suggestion is another Allan Dwan film, but in this case one I haven't seen yet. Any Dwan film that has a good shot of being inducted, I can get behind.

40. Some Came Running (1958). Vincente Minnelli may be well represented on the NFR (my quick count shows he directed at least five films listed), but his non-musicals are still sorely under-represented, and will be until this remarkable achievement (for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirly MacLaine as well) gets inducted.

41. Sonata For Pen, Brush & Ruler (1968). Few films consist of as much concentrated, pure visual beauty as this outstanding short made by experimental animator Barry Spinello. It happens to screen October 19th as part of the long-missed Alternative Visions program, according to the new BAMPFA print calendar.

42. Southern Comfort (1981). There may be other Walter Hill films better poised to be the director's Registry debut, but this one, which I saw for the first time at the New Mission earlier this year, strikes me as a pretty good candidate, given its great cast, story and attention to the specifics of two clashing milieus: "weekend warrior" reservist soldiers and reclusive Bayou dwellers that could pass for subjects of a Les Blank documentary.

43. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Simply, Buster Keaton's best film not yet entered into the NFR. No further argument needed.

44. Take Off (1972). Gunvor Nelson may be too often thought of as Swedish to feel deserving of a film in the Registry. I disagree, especially considering she was living in the Bay Area when she made many of her best short films. This one is a playful, feminist gem and a tour de force of optical printing.

45. Tribulation 99 (1991). Not necessarily my own personal favorite of Craig Baldwin's culture jamming radical manifestos (that would be the following year's ¡O No Coronado!) but almost certainly the one most likely to go down in history as a major statement at a major moment by a major filmmaker (admittedly one I'm friendly with personally). So lets start the process as soon as possible!

46. Underworld, USA (1961). No Sam Fuller films have been placed on the Registry since Shock Corridor twenty years ago. This gangland saga would be my first choice for a second selection from his filmography. It's bold, intense, and influential, and nobody but Fuller could've made it.

47. Wagon Master (1950). It may seem that John Ford has been amply honored by the National Film Registry, with more than a handful of films selected from among his storied career. But I feel there's room for at least one more, especially this one with its yearning for an America in which good people from different backgrounds cooperate for a common purpose.

48. Wanda (1970). Barbara Loden famously only directed one film but it's a doozy and its penultimate placement on this list shouldn't imply anything other than W's late placement in the alphabet. If I could only vote for five and not fifty titles, it'd still make the cut.

49. You Oughta Be In Pictures (1940). My third Friz Freleng selection is the semi-autobiographical retelling of his straying from the Warner Brothers lot to take a contract with MGM between 1937 and 1939, using Daffy Duck (interacting in a live-action environment) as his avatar.

Let me know what you'd pick in the comments!

HOW: Kiss Me Deadly and Five screen together, both from 35mm prints.

Shanghai Express (1932)

Screen capture from TCM/Universal DVD

WHO: Josef Von Sternberg directed this, the chronological center and arguably the best of the seven masterful films he made starring the incomparable Marlene Dietrich.

WHAT: Here's what Elliot Lavine said when I asked him why he picked Shanghai Express from among all the great Von Sternberg films to play in his current I Wake Up Dreaming tribute to pre-code Hollywood:

Elliot Lavine: It's a tough call. I'd have been happy putting any of them in. I have a personal fondness for this film. Beyond that, everybody loves the train in the early '30s. The sexual tension is totally honest. You can totally believe everything that they're telling you about this relationship between her and Clive Brook, and I think people respond to it that way. You know, there's a handful of pre-codes that show out of that context and still get a great, enthusiastic crowd. 

Hell On Frisco Bay: Plus, Anna May Wong?

EL: Especially Anna May Wong. Any opportunity to get her in. And she's used to beautifully in the film. Yeah, there's a whole lot going for that film. The last time I showed it was at the Roxie a couple years ago and it was packed. Beforehand I thought "this will probably be the one that doesn't draw quite as well." 

HoFB: Because people have seen it. 

EL: Yeah, but boy they all came out. 

HoFB: Because they want to see it again! 

EL: And that is a great, great quality. People gleefully seeing a movie multiple times. It still happens.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:45 tonight at the Castro Theatre and 2PM Sunday March 12 at the Rafael Film Center.

WHY: I think it's pure coincidence that both the Rafael and the Castro are showing this great film this week, but it's a terrific opportunity to see it on big screens, if you have yet to do that. More than once if you're game for that. The Rafael has booked it as part of a train film series that also includes 35mm prints of John Frankenheimer's The Train and Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train, as well as DCPs of David Lean's Brief Encounter, Tony Scott's Unstoppable and, of course The Lady Vanishes (which also shows up in 35mm in Palo Alto next month as part of the Stanford's just-begun Hitchcock series). 

But I first saw it and instantly fell in love with it as part of a Castro Theatre pre-code series nearly fifteen years ago, and would definitely select tonight's option of seeing it in a similar context, if I could only attend one showing. There's something so special about seeing an early-1930s film in a single-screen theatre still essentially the same as it was in that era, as I did two weeks ago when I saw the tremendous Two Seconds when it opened Elliot Lavine's current weekly pre-code series. If you haven't already, please do read part one of my interview with Lavine. Here's more of part two:

HoFB: The Castro hasn't done a proper pre-code series in years- although Eddie Muller has tried a pre-code night at Noir City a couple times, it's even been a few years since the last one of those.

EL: I don't understand why those guys don't go deeper and I'm glad they don't, because I like having this territory to myself. For now, until somebody gets hip to it. But the Castro jumped very enthusiastically, when I proposed it to them, so I'm very grateful to those guys for seeing the value in it.

HoFB: Obviously it means that everyone felt that your August 2015 noir set was a success. 

EL: Oh yeah. We'll be back in August with another noir show. I really love the vertical programming concept. To be honest with you I was getting burned out on the whole notion of doing eight to twelve days in a row. I think it's putting a lot onto the audience. A lot of them do it. They come night after night after night. But if you took them aside secretly and said 'would you prefer doing it once a week' they would say 'yeah. We would.' I had so many people last August at the Castro.

HoFB: Will it also be Thursdays, like last year was? Or Wednesdays like these pre-codes?

EL: It'll be either Wednesday or Thursday.

HoFB: I'm rooting for Thursday. I'll be missing the first feature for this series almost every week because of my work schedule. If I race over from work I can see all the last features, though, except for The Cheat. 

EL: These really play well at 9:30.

HoFB: But it's also why I didn't go to your California Theatre shows last Fall. Can't get over to Berkeley on a Wednesday.

EL: I'll be doing another film noir show there in April. It has to be all digital. They don't run 35 there anymore.

HoFB: I know they brought a 35mm projector back in to screen Interstellar. Did they take it out right away afterward?

EL: It's not being used. Initially when I talked with Jed about doing a show there, I said, are you really sure you want to do it in digital? Because these aren't DCPs. These are DVDs. Blu-Rays. Are they gonna look great? And he said, 'don't take my word for it. Bring a stack of them down one afternoon and we'll sit and watch and you be the judge.' I was flabbergasted. I felt confident to do it. I can speak for this show in a great way. And we had a good crowd. Nobody complained about anything. They were just thrilled to have repertory in the East Bay.  

HoFB: There's one DVD presentation expected at this Castro pre-code series. William Wellman's Safe in Hell. I'm guessing it's too obscure a title to be given the DCP treatment yet, but there's also probably no circulating 35mm print. 

EL: Well, there was. I ran a 35 of this way back in the '90s. That's long enough ago that, yeah, a print can get completely disintegrated, and this is not the kind of film that would wind up high on the priority list, especially in the '90s. But now there's a growing awareness of the film.

HoFB: One of my favorite Wellmans.

EL: Me too. It's in my top five, and that says a lot. He made a lot of great films. This one is especially stunning. When people come to it for the very first time, especially if they've been hyped by their friends or by me, that this is gonna be a serious, major experience, they come out and say, "yes you were right. I can't believe it. Oh my God." But it is spectacular for a variety of reasons. I think one of the great reasons is the performance of that actress Dorothy MacKaill.

HoFB: Yeah. I looked at another of her films on DVD a couple days ago because I hadn't seen any of her others- The Office Wife. It's okay, but it's nothing like this.

EL: She didn't have a big body of work. Any actress in the world, if this was in their resume it'd be their calling card, but if you don't have a whole lot to back it up, you're not going to be well-remembered, necessarily. And even though Wellman is a top director, a high-echelon director, you can't expect people to be savvy to every fucking film he ever made. So this one was sacrificed.

HoFB: Do you think it's forgotten partially because of the sordidness of it?

EL: Indirectly, I think so, because, with a handful of exceptions, the majority of the pre-code films from that period, '31 through '33, when studios sold off their packages to TV stations, they excluded those. They were, more often than not, left out of the package. So, Warners might sell a hundred of their titles to ABC affiliates or whatever for Afternoon Movie, Late Show, that kind of shit. But it was a very select group. Things that showed off the studio in a way that would be family-friendly on television. So Safe In Hell didn't have a prayer.

HoFB: They might show a cut version of The Public Enemy, or maybe Night Nurse.

EL: Exactly. A film like Public Enemy was on all the time. So was [I Am A Fugitive From a] Chain Gang. You couldn't go six months without stumbling across it. And that's great, but what about Two Seconds? What about Safe In Hell? What about a thousand other films that were kind of put into the vault?

HOW: Shanghai Express screens as a 35mm print on a double-bill with Safe in Hell (which screens from a DVD) at the Castro, and as a DCP at the Rafael.

Scarface (1932)

Screen shot from Universal DVD

WHO: Howard Hawks directed this.

WHAT: I believe this is the first Hawks film I ever watched as a Hawks film, (I'd seen Bringing Up Baby long before I'd heard the word auteur, or at least known what it meant). It still informs my ideas of that director's interest in men and women and the spaces they inhabit more than any other film, probably. Which makes sense, as it was usually cited by Hawks himself as his own favorite of his films. Richard Brody has collected a salient quote from a Joseph McBride book, while himself calling the film

by far the most visually inventive and tonally anarchic movie that Hawks made. Among other things, it’s a tribute to the freedom that independent producers afforded directors then—and still do today. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 7:45 PM.

WHY: Scarface is the ideal opening salvo in Elliot Lavine's I Wake Up Dreaming series of so-called "pre-code" films released before the enforcement of the a censorship code for Hollywood films began in 1934, which morphed into the MPAA rating system in 1968 (still in place and constantly obsessed over in certain quarters today). Lavine earned a reputation as one of Frisco Bay's most creative film programmers in part by putting together week-long or longer binges of these films to the Roxie Theatre beginning in the 1990s. Now, following on bringing last summer's successful series of film noir to the largest repertory screen in town, the Castro, Lavine launches a 14-title pre-code series in that venue, reserving each of the next six Wednesday nights for double- and triple-bills of films featuring sex, violence, political content and other subjects that would be taboo on American movie screens just a few years after they were made. I was able to interview Lavine briefly last week, and here is a transcript of part one of our discussion. Expect more of the interview in this space in coming weeks.

Hell On Frisco Bay: I noticed that this festival is focused very narrowly on films released during a twenty-two month period: November 1931 to September '33.

Elliot Lavine: Yeah. It's the center of the apple. Especially '32. '32 is a ground-breaking year, actually. Some of the best films were made in '31. My personal favorite was made in '31, which is Safe In Hell. But '32 is endless. You could do a whole festival. It's to pre-code what 1947 is to film noir.

HoFB: I think New York's Film Forum did a 1933 festival at one point.

EL: Not a shabby year either. You even find some good ones in 1934 before the boom came down. The Black Cat is one that came out that year.

HoFB: Why is this the center of the apple?

EL: Maybe because in '31 they were perfecting things. Getting away with murder. A code that nobody chose to enforce. And I'm sure they were feeling really frisky. Like European artists, they could do whatever they wanted. People in bed together, smoking opium, getting away with shit. It was really kind of unbridled. It was like the Wild West in the 1880s or something. I think at some point you have to peak. There's a zenith. Call Her Savage came out in 1932. The Story of Temple Drake. One after another, and all of them are just phenomenal. It's wide-ranging. It's not just sex shows; it's things like I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. Two Seconds- that's 1932. So it's film after film after film after film. And I think it was like the Alps, right up there at the peak. Which is not to say that '33 slipped off, but by '34 it was gone, so it gave you a very short window to measure. And you could almost get a micrometer in there and say, 'when did it peak'? 'Well, September 1932.'

HoFB: Do you have any theories on what was the impetus for making these kinds of films in the first place?

EL:  I would say it was a combination of knowing that they could get away with a lot; that nobody was going to enforce any kind of censorial nonsense on them, up to a point. I mean they can't have people fucking in them but they can allude to it.

HoFB: Or saying 'fuck.'

EL: Right, but they didn't care about that. They just wanted to be able to deal with adult themes in a way that translated to an audience, especially an audience that was being kicked to death by the Depression. That is a big component to why the films work so incredibly well. That layer of doom and despair. It's like World War II's relationship to film noir- a horrible crisis that is complicating everybody's lives. It's a dominant motif of the world. So many of the stories reflect that. Wild Boys of the Road more than any- now that's 1933. Probably more than any film of that generation. I think it's a combination of smart directors who are artistically valid and interesting guys, in an environment where people felt desperate and in need of stories that reflected their own reality. Who the fuck wants to see happy-go-lucky musicals all the time? That crowd was being taken care of. But the other people who were making hardly any, or no money, and they would try to scrounge to keep things going. Scrape together that nickel, you know. They wanted to see something that makes sense. They didn't want an escapist fantasy.

HoFB: Of course some of the best happy-go-lucky musicals had a lot of sex in them too.

EL: That was de rigeur. It probably never occurred to these writers and directors that it would be any other way, ever. They probably thought, 'this is the way it's gonna be. It's gonna get better and better and better. By the forties we'll be showing everything, like Sweden.' Obviously that was not meant to be. There had to be a way of mollifying the great middle crossroads of America. People dug it in New York, L.A. and San Francisco. Everywhere in between, exhibitors were feeling the pinch because people just weren't coming. They were boycotting the movies. They were saying "we're fed up. We don't like all the sex and the murder, and it's not what we want to see. We're gonna stop coming to your theatre unless you start showing more wholesome entertainment." So [exhibitors] would say "Okay Warner Brothers, this is your friend Bob in Ohio, and I'm telling you my patrons are clamoring for cleaner entertainment." When you start hearing it from thousands of exhibitors, "we won't go to your shows." "We will boycott Warner Brother films." They had to listen. That was the sole motivating principle behind enforcing the code.

HoFB: Some of the histories indicate the provocative material was a desperate grab for box office.

EL: Yes because the marketing department of every studio was looking for hooks to hang everything on. What's gonna get people in New York interested about this movie. People have seen everything. They've done everything. Let's promise them a movie that will measure up to that level of recognition. They're gonna see people having sex, taking dope, committing murder, all kinds of fun stuff that you only get in the movies. It's a shame because censorship in any form is not welcome. It's not a good thing. However it did drive the industry in a slightly different way. I think we had a greater gravitational pull for directors who could work within those restrictions and still turn out interesting films. They may not have been as provocative or real as the pre-code films but they achieved some different artifice.  I guess we should, just because it's what we wound up with, feel grateful for that.

HoFB: Speaking of directors, I want to talk about Howard Hawks and Scarface, because although it was released in 1932, it's the one film you're showing that was made before the others. I read it was originally slated for release in 1931.

EL: Ready to go in '30.

HoFB: And it was held up precisely for some of the things you've been talking about.

EL: It went farther than most other films were going at the time, and most films were going pretty far. But he kept running into problems. Censorial problems, essentially around sex. The violence was pretty extreme. Really casual. People were dispatched very routinely. That went against what would ultimately be deemed the moral tempo of the film- that people could just murder people casually! And kids in the audience are cheering.

HoFB: Do you think people in Hollywood found ways to see this film? Did it have a reputation before its release?

EL: Insiders probably saw it.

HoFB: Do you think it had an influence prior to its actual release?

EL: It's funny because when people talk about classic gangster films of the 1930s they'll immediately bring up The Public Enemy and Little Caesar- well, actually Little Caesar was made in '30 as well if you look at the release date [January 9, 1931], but nevertheless Scarface, by people only looking at the numbers printed on the pages, "well that was in the aftermath" But that was the predecessor. Had it gone out in '30 or even '31 it would probably be a better known film. It's not that it's not known. To be honest with you a lot of people who come to Little Caesar and Public Enemy, while they're impressed by certain things about it, they don't really enjoy the films that much. And they think, "I don't need another one. I don't need to see Scarface. I'm done with that. Show me a musical now, or a prostitute movie." So I think it suffered a little bit. It also had sketchy ownership issues for a while. You couldn't see the film, even after it had been released. I can't think of a single time, growing up, that I ever saw it listed on television. Maybe it did sneak in here and there but I was glued to the TV Guide. I was a nine-year-old kid with a subscription to TV Guide. So it comes as a big, pleasant surprise, because it wipes the floor with those other movies. Public Enemy, if you were to excise maybe 10 minutes...

HoFB: It doesn't exist in its original form anyway.

EL: Hardly any of them do. Freaks- can you imagine seeing a 90-minute version of that? Which is what people did see in a preview setting.

HoFB: Is that why so many of these films are so short?

EL: Many of them. They probably lose at least five minutes because they've gone too far somewhere. Someone says, "oh the hand is going under the dress..." Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was re-released in the mid-'30s, heavily cut. Seven or eight minutes were cut out. They're back in the 97-minute version that Warner Brothers now has the print of.

HOW: Scarface screens on an all-35mm double-bill with another pre-code crime picture, Two Seconds.

Marisa Vela: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here. 

IOHTE contributor Marisa Vela is a cinephile and artist.

So much of my focus this past year was fighting for the right to remain in our studio spaces, a fight that we ultimately lost. I did not make it to as many films as i would have liked.

1. Wanda- Barbara Loden 1970 SFIFF screening Castro Theater. introduction by Rachael Kushner, who wrote about the film in her novel, The Flamethrowers. Beautiful, painful film, it has stayed with me. Saturated color and graininess of 16mm blown up to 35mm

2. The Wild Wild Rose- Tian-Ling Wang 1960 A Rare Noir Is Good To Find, Roxie. Grace Chang dazzles in this Hong Kong nightclub update of Carmen.

3. The Swallow and the Titmouse- Andre Antoine 1920 Silent Film Festival, Castro Theater. Woefully under attended, being the final film of a long day. Gorgeous scenes on a barge floating down waterways, with a tougher more perceptive view of the characters than one is initially led to believe.

4. The Honeymoon Killers- Leonard Kastle 1969 Noir City, Castro Theater. What’s not to like?

5. The Sleeping Tiger- Joseph Losey 1954 Noir City, Castro Theater Dirk Bogarde bringing that “something” to the screen that we will see more of in The Servant.

6. The Devils- Ken Russell 1971, Castro Theater. A full house on a Tuesday night.

7. Dementia- John Parker 1953, I Wake Up Dreaming, Castro Theater. A dark dream with a George Antheil score.

8. The Scarlet Dove- Matti Kassila 1961 A Rare Noir Is Good To Find, Roxie. Shared a double-bill with The Wild Wild Rose. This Finnish film is a cautionary tale of the lengths the protagonist will go once he begins to doubt his wife.

9. A Man Escaped- Robert Bresson 1956 Roxie.

10. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me- David Lynch 1992, Castro Theater.

David Robson: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor and cinephile-at large David Robson documents his offline movie-viewing at a number of online film sites, like his own blog the House of Sparrows, and he cohabitates with those adorable simian cinephiles at Monkeys Go To Movies.

I usually limit myself to one movie per filmmaker for these, but Max is great enough to list twice. Ever since David Wong introduced The Exile during the Invasion of the Cinemaniacs! at YBCA I've been "collecting" the films of Max Ophuls, i.e. seeing every damn screening of his movies that I can. I was delighted that the hard-bitten mofos at Noir City basically book-ended the year with Ophuls, showing the exquisite Caught during the Noir City festival in January and The Reckless Moment during their winter preview in December. Watching Ophuls navigate his camera thru the psychological extremis of his characters is one of classic cinema's most savory delights; James Mason is pretty grand in very different roles in both movies, too.

Even after three viewings I continued to struggle with Godard's Goodbye to Language. And yet the ongoing struggle seemed to cleanse the palate for a lovely 35mm print of his mid-80s, Cannon Films-produced King Lear, which played fast and loose with Shakespeare's play but resonated with surprising, often graceful, clarity on all of its subjects. Amid all of Godard's theorizing and deconstruction his cast land their marks with considerable emotion and grace. No surprise that Burgess Meredith should make his Lear-infused gangster resonate across both genre and Shakespearean lines, but Molly Ringwald (who made this movie amid the John Hughes teen flicks that landed her permanently in the 80s firmament) is equally graceful, and, in a bit part as a shady editor,  Woody Allen registers with a conviction and gravitas no one else bothered to ever mine in him. A theatre friend with whom I saw the thing called it a terrific piece of devised theatre, and he's right. Bonus: the quick but graceful callout to Orson Welles in reel 2.

Yerba Buena Center's Cracked Actor series offered a fine retrospective of the film performances of the late David Bowie. The Prestige turned out to be the eye-opener in the series, showcasing not just Bowie's fantastic supporting performance (suggesting his particular charisma is best served by such roles) but a surprisingly emotional mid-career opus by its maker, Christopher Nolan. Nolan's work had always left me more impressed than touched or moved, but between this and Interstellar (seen in glorious 70mm at the Castro early last year) I'm reconsidering my bias.

It was pretty genius, the pairing of Hitchcock's The Birds with Larry Cohen's Q. Very much a yin/yang pairing: whereas the lives of carefully delineated characters in a realistic setting are disrupted by an unexplained bird attack in the Hitchcock, Cohen offers a carefully explained series of attacks by a winged serpent on New Yorkers and fills the rest of the movie with a bewildering rogues gallery of engaging weirdos and apparently improvised moments - Michael Moriarty's singing of his own song "Evil Dream" is just the beginning of a performance more like a jazz solo than any other piece of film acting I can recall, but David Carradine finds his own space to add accents around Moriarty, even as he can't quite believe what the hell is going on in front of him. And the undercover mime should have become a franchise. Hitchcock's ambiguities let his movie linger in the mind, but Cohen's never-ending and increasingly lunatic pre-Giuliani NYC smorgasbord is just as fulfilling.

Sure, the Silent Film Festival offered more monumental, moving and graceful works, but when, during the Charlie Bowers comedies, the stop-motion squirrel fished all of the shit out of her purse in search of a nutcracker, I absolutely lost it. And that's just one little throwaway incident amid four works bristling with avant-garde fearlessness and boundless imagination; Bowers is exactly the kind of unique but under-known talent that rep cinema is supposed to introduce to its audiences.

As is Robert Montgomery, perhaps, whose Ride the Pink Horse attained true cult status last year. I'm grateful to Elliot Lavine for booking a lovely print of the movie during his Castro noir series, allowing this sweaty and nuanced yarn to breathe new life.

A startlingly well-built Wim Wenders retrospective began making the rounds of the US late last year, and the Castro gave up all of its November Mondays to many of the movies. As nice as it was to see them all (including many a cinephile's holy grail: the five hour cut of Until The End of the World), The State of Things resonated most strongly with me. Seen in the context of Wenders' other largely-improvised movies, The State of Things (inspired strongly by delays on another movie) reflects beautifully on the ongoing conflict between art and commerce, and the everyday lives of those caught between. Even the car chase, beautifully executed within a single longshot taking in several city blocks, seems to have picked up on the movie's quiet, laid-back resonance. Lovely performance by Samuel Fuller as the practical but all-knowing cinematographer.

I suspect many found it dated or had other reasons for not engaging with it (the buzz one feels after a movie grabs an entire audience, then gently releases them, seemed utterly gone), but goddammit, I'd grown up watching Laurie Anderson's concert movie Home of the Brave on video, and finally seeing it projected, on 35mm, and HEARING it, was that rare experience of seeing a movie one knows by heart for the very first time. Obviously there's a bias on my part that lands this movie, a crucial influence and touchstone on my youth, on this list. But even if its gorgeous and awe-inspiring reveals - the yonic chasm that Anderson's sampler/violin tears thru the climax of "Smoke Rings"; the detonation of the full vocal sample at the end of "Late Show"; the siren that I found, THIS WHOLE TIME, had been baying unobtrusively but insistently behind Adrian Belew and David van Tieghem's otherwise spare and quiet duet - meant nothing to to one in the theatre but me, I felt reconnected, inspired, restored, alive.

And if Home of the Brave connected me to myself, David Lynch's The Straight Story (my final 2015 Frisco Bay screening) connected me: to Doris, a fellow Lynchian as psyched to see this never-screened gem as I; to Richard Farnsworth, the elderly and frail but determined star of the movie, given another curtain call; to Lynch, crafting one of his most personal works, a G-rated Disney family movie that no one but David Lynch could have made; to Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, whose intro didn't mention "neo-sincerity", his patented term for his non-ironic approach to older movies, but was instead delicately, movingly, simply, sincere; to my family, the bundle of sticks that don't break; to my fellow cinephiles and other interested parties in the rep theatres of San Francisco; to the coming holidays; to the very universe itself. David Lynch's The Straight Story, it turns out, remains one hell of a movie. Can't wait to see what's next.

Max Goldberg: IOHTE

The San Francisco Bay Area is still home to a rich cinephilic culture nurtured in large part by a diverse array of cinemas, programmers and moviegoers. I'm honored to present a selection of favorite screenings experienced by local cinephiles in 2015. An index of participants can be found here.

IOHTE contributor Max Goldberg lives in Oakland and collects his writings on film at mgoldberg.net.

Yugoslav Avant-Garde Cinema, 1950s-1980s: Ex-Film from an Ex-Land (Series at Pacific Film Archive, March)
I had no idea.

Visages d’enfants, dir. Jacques Feyder (San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theatre, May 30)
 I was completely unprepared for this exacting portrayal of a child’s grief and subsequent coming of age.

Out of the Blue, dir. Dennis Hopper (Castro Theatre, June 3)
A one-of-a-kind, end-of-the-line film with Neil Young’s voice shakier than usual echoing in the Castro. Hopper’s update of Rebel Without a Cause offers a final flameout ahead of the Reagan years.

Only Yesterday, dir. John Stahl (Pacific Film Archive, June 20)
All the evidence you would ever need to dispel the simplistic opposition of “melodrama” and “realism.” A deep bow to Margaret Sullavan’s performance—her debut, amazingly.

Screen capture from Music Box Films DVD: The Story of Film

Mirror, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky (Pacific Film Archive, July 11)
When I last saw this film projected, it was in an empty theatre. The PFA, by contrast, was turning people away all throughout its Tarkovsky retro. I continue to find the Russian auteur's cult a little baffling but must admit that it was quite moving to watch such a personal film in a sold-out house.

Nightfall, dir. Jacques Tourneur (Castro Theatre, September 3)
Cinephiles often glorify the theatrical experience for the quality of the image, but Nightfall was a case where seeing it on the big screen really brought home the insidious logic of the cutting. This film has a marvelous way of stitching disparate spaces together into its cracked vision of Fifties America.

Amy Halpern Canyon Cinema Salon (New Nothing Cinema, October 5)
It's always refreshing to see an experimental filmmaker creating work with extraordinary technical chops, and that is certainly the case with Halpern’s films.

The Boys from Fengkuei, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien (SFFS Taiwan Film Days at the Embarcadero, October 13)
How considerate for SFFS to have programmed this for a chaser to The Assassin. I only wish some of those people turned away from the Tarkovsky films might have filled more of the seats at the Embarcadero.

Ride the Pink Horse (1947)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

WHO: Robert Montgomery directed and starred in this film, shortly after doing the same in the notorious experiment Lady In The Lake, which was filmed entirely from the perspective of the lead character. This follow-up was not.

WHAT: I haven't seen Ride the Pink Horse yet, but I can't wait to. I first came across the title perusing Academy Award nominee lists; Thomas Gomez was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in this film, by some measures the chronologically first on a short list of Hispanic nominees over the years. Then in 2011 Elliot Lavine showed it in his "I Wake Up Dreaming" series at the Roxie and Steve Seid screened it as part of his "American Noir in Mexico" Pacific Film Archive series, and though I missed both showings I heard from many that it was a standout noir. So I wasn't all that surprised when Criterion added it to its collection despite its non-canonical status. Perhaps it's part of a shifting canon, however. Dennis Harvey guesses that it "may be the best border-town noir predating Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil" in his essential 48hills article this week.

WHERE/WHEN: 7:30 PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre, as part of I Wake Up Dreaming 2015.

WHY: Harvey's article gives a much better explanation of Elliot Lavine's 5-Thursday noir series, and why it's at the Castro Theatre rather than Lavine's traditional curatorial home the Roxie, than I would be able to. Pam Grady has also written a generous preview. As someone whose cinephilia blossomed at the tail end of Lavine's original stint at the Roxie, and whose interest in noir was stoked more at the Castro than at that venue, I'm not the ideal person to talk about the full importance of his past programming glories. I take it on faith that a huge part of the current fashion for noir, especially in San Francisco, is thanks to his efforts. But testimonials to this fact can come from the most unlikely places. I happen to have just read Patton Oswalt's new(ish) book Silver Screen Fiend, which is an oddly ambivalent recounting of the famous comedian's four years of obsessive moviegoing in Los Angeles. Mostly. But he occasionally hints at the role that San Francisco screenings played in his cinemania, and rather comes out and says it (at the risk of diminishing his overall, LA-centric thesis) on page 10:

I became addicted to film noir during the three years I lived in San Francisco, when the Roxie Theater on Sixteenth Street would do its noir festival every spring. I saw H. Bruce Humberstone's brilliant I Wake Up Screaming in 1993. That scene where psycho policeman Laird Cregar stares, openmouthed and turtle-eyed, as the film of his now-dead, unattainable dream girl plays in the smoky interrogation room? The one he's using to torment slick, grinning Victor Mature, hoping to railroad the poor bastard into the electric chair? That got me. Wow, did that get me.

Of course Oswalt's describing a scene from the film that inspired the name of Lavine's current series, from a screening that Lavine undoubtedly programmed and perhaps introduced. His taste was a formative influence on the aesthetic sensibilities of a guy who now has well over 2 million twitter followers. I Wake Up Screaming isn't one of the twelve titles Lavine's offering up for his first gig at the Castro, but from what I've seen of and heard about the selections, I'm not going to want to miss very many of the showings. The first three Thursdays are entirely populated by films I've never seen before, though some of them (especially Ride the Pink Horse, So Dark the Night and the Frisco-set Chinatown at Midnight) have been on my must-watch lists for a long time. I've seen four of the five films playing the final two weeks of the series, and all at the Roxie as part of Lavine double-bills. My favorite of the four is definitely Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall, followed by Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss, which just might be the first noir I ever saw at the Roxie. The one I haven't seen yet is Dementia, but I've been kicking myself for missing it when Lavine last programmed it over four years ago, and I'm thrilled to get another chance. 

HOW: All screenings in I Wake Up Dreaming 2015 are sourced from 35mm prints. Ride the Pink Horse plays on a double-bill with So Dark the Night.