IOHTE: Maureen Russell

"IOHTE" stands for "I Only Have Two Eyes"; it's my annual survey of selected San Francisco Bay Area cinephiles' favorite in-the-cinema screenings of classic films and archival oddities from the past year. An index of participants can be found here.

Contributor Maureen Russell is a cinephile and Noir City film festival volunteer.

There is a lot of noir on my list for 2014.

Screen capture from Strand DVD of Victims Of Sin

1) Noir City 12– The Castro Theatre, Jan. 24 – Feb. 2
The theme of international noir brought rarities and classics from around the globe. Seeing French alongside American, British, rare Argentinian and European selections provided great context, as filmmakers adapted what others were doing and made their own mark. Highlights include the Kurosawa directing Toshiro Mifune double feature Stray Dog (1949) with Drunken Angel (1948) and the wildly fun Mexican musical noir Victims of Sin / Victimas del Pecado (1951) with great music and dance numbers.

2) SF Silent Film Fest
Highlights: the creative Russian film The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, USSR (1924). Musical Accompaniment by the Matti Bye Ensemble

Underground, UK (1928). Directed by Anthony Asquith, Musical Accompaniment by multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne. This love triad turns dark, set in working class London with beautiful cinematography.   

Also Dragnet Girl, Japan (1933). Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, Musical Accompaniment by Guenter Buchwald

3) The French Had a Name for It / French Film Noir 1946-64 San Francisco's Roxie Theatre from November 14-17
Great festival with many sold-out screenings. My favorite was Witness in the City (Un Temoin Dans La Ville) (1959) for its story, characters, tension, location shooting and chase scenes through the streets of Paris, and beautiful cinematography.

4) A Hard Day’s Night (1964) New 4K restoration for the 50th Anniversary – The Castro Theatre
A double bill with Richard Lester’s next film, The Knack…and how to get it (’65). Seeing the beautiful restoration, I wasn’t sure if I’d even seen this on the big screen. The audience seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the Fab 4 as much as I was. The Knack is a farce set in Swinging London.

5) Marketa Lazarova (1967) – the Roxie 7/14 – new 35mm print Czechoslovakia I hadn’t heard of this classic Czech film before. Medieval setting shot using inventive technique.

6) Double feature at I Wake Up Dreaming noir festival, 5/25 – The Roxie
Brainstorm. Directed by William Conrad. (1965)
The Couch. Directed by Owen Crump. (1962)

Screen capture from Warner DVD

7) The Unknown (Director Tod Browning, 1927, USA, with Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford)
SFIFF – The Castro 5/6/14 – Silent film with live accompaniment by Stephin Merritt 
Shown with Guy Maddin's short Sissy Boy Slap Party (1995) 
I’d seen this film before: great characters, visuals and acting, with darkness and humor that Chaney and Browning can give. 

8) Inland Empire (2006) 
The Roxie 7/22 
David Lynch’s own 35mm print screened. I had never seen this and was waiting to watch it on the big screen. 

Screen capture from Celestial DVD

9) King Boxer (Five Fingers of Death) – Hong Kong, 1972
CAAM Fest – Great Star Theater 3/14/14 – Run Run Shaw Tribute
Released in the USA by Warner Bros. in March 1973, the film was responsible for beginning the North American kung fu film craze of the 1970s.

10) Burroughs at 100: The Films of William S Burroughs
February 3, 2014. City Lights Bookstore, with commentary by Mindaugis Bagdon.
A screening of the William S Burrough's films Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups, and Bill and Tony. (early 60s). It was great to be able to see entire short films using the cut-up technique, even if at least one film tested your patience.

IOHTE: Ben Armington

"IOHTE" stands for "I Only Have Two Eyes"; it's my annual survey of selected San Francisco Bay Area cinephiles' favorite in-the-cinema screenings of classic films and archival oddities from the past year. An index of participants can be found here.

Contributor Ben Armington self-describes as "Box Cubed Box Office guy for many Bay Area Film Festivals; watcher of movies"

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1.    The Shanghai Gesture (Castro, Noir City)

A humid colonial melodrama with a very noir heart, oozing erotic obsession and creeping hysteria from it’s every plothole.  My favorite from a fun line up of international films at Eddie Mueller’s great Noir City film festival.  Legend has it that sultan of cinematic sultriness Josef Von Sternberg directed most of this hallucination while lying on his back on a cot (he was sick, the story goes).

2.    Je t’aime, Je t’aime (Castro)

 Alain Resnais’ death-haunted sci-fi head trip up, down, around memory lane is strongly reminiscent of his sometime collaborator Chris Marker’s masterpiece La Jetee, but has a heartbreaking sense of despondency all it’s own embedded in it’s flawless montage.  Featuring the weirdest time machine ever to grace the big screen.

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3.    Goodbye South, Goodbye (PFA, HHH retro)

All seven films I saw at the travelling retrospective of director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s work that landed at the PFA towards the end of the year were worthy, even revelatory, experiences, but Goodbye South, Goodbye was the one I plugged into the most so it’s getting the shout here.  Something about the hard-luck inertia the characters are mulishly wading through combined with images of fleeting, exhilarating motion rang very true, very affecting.  Here’s hoping that Hou finishes his new film soon!

4.    The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (Roxie, I Wake Up Dreaming)

A nifty, fleet-footed gangster saga with a pretty grim view of what we’ll call the success ethic.  Directed by Budd Boetticher with the same lean and mean precision that can be found in his celebrated Ranown cycle of westerns and co-starring Warren Oates as the sickly brother.

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5.    Don’t Look Now/Daughters of Darkness (Castro)

Diabolical, super-stylish double feature of films often classified as horror but which strike me more as gothics, in the sense that they are about past traumas haunting the present and repressed sexual tensions bubbling up screaming to the surface more than the wheezy hack and slash dynamics often associated with the horror genre... anyways, I love them both and was thrilled to see them on the big screen at the Castro.

   

6.    Ora, Plata, Mata (YBCA, Filipino Film Festival)

A rip-roaring historical epic in the Gone With the Wind mode following two upper-middle class families’ travails through the strife of the Second World War in the Philippines.  I went to this one mainly because friends were going only to be helplessly sucked into it’s entertaining embrace.

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7.    Popeye (Castro, M4M)

I wouldn’t want to make a case for the subversiveness of this oft unfunny major studio release from noodly autuer Robert Altman, but I do find it’s ornery bizarreness captivating, and enjoy Altman’s anarchic refusal to focus on  plot points in favor of letting the rhubarbing cast squawk at each other.  It was very poignant to watch Robin Williams mumble his way through the lead role with characteristic good nature and grace.  This was his film debut.  With songs by Harry Nilsson.

8.    Side Street/Une Femme Marie (PFA)

A seemingly random double feature of less-heralded films by filmmakers I compulsively return to (Anthony Mann and Jean-Luc Godard) that seemed to speak to each other in subliminal and nigh subterranean ways.

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9.    The Long Riders (Castro)

I’m a big fan of westerns and director Walter Hill, so this one pretty much had me from the opening credits.  A re-telling of the familiar James/Younger gang myth colored in with the stunt casting of real-life brothers as brothers in the narrative (the brothers Keach,  Carradine, Quaid and Guest all saddle up), the film really comes alive in it’s interstitial dialogue with other westerns (most plainly The Wild Bunch) and in Hill’s dynamic staging of the breathtaking and bloody action scenes. 

10.  The Violent Men/40 Guns (Stanford)

More westerns!  The fun of this double bill was how, even though both films are in the same genre and thus speak the same language, they were completely different in execution.  Rudolph Mate’s The Violent Men is like a smooth ride in a stately carriage, comfortable and serene, whereas Sam Fuller’s 40 Guns is like jumping on a careening roller coaster and realizing that the brake man is passed out drunk.  You arrive at the same place, basically, with both films, but the difference in delivery is illuminating.  Also, it was a high point in my cinematic year watching Barbara Stanwyck spit out Fuller’s rapid fire dialogue.

IOHTE: Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

"IOHTE" stands for "I Only Have Two Eyes"; it's my annual survey of selected San Francisco Bay Area cinephiles' favorite in-the-cinema screenings of classic films and archival oddities from the past year. An index of participants can be found here.

Contributor Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University and curates/hosts the MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS series at the Castro Movie Theatre, which showcases underrated, overlooked and dismissed films in a neo-sincere manner.

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10. The Astrologer (Craig Denney, 1975) The only 35mm print in existence @ The New People Cinema part of "Another Hole in the Head" Film Festival. If only audiences would have allowed the film to work its magic before they started making fun of it. There really is something quite daring and motivated by Denney's descent here.

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9.My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) 
One of the most beautiful 171 minutes (11 reels) projected from an anamorphic 2.35:1 IB Technicolor 35mm print ever experienced @ The Castro Theatre

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8. A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989) Perhaps the last time this 35mm will screen in the US, @ Pacific Film Archive

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7. People's Park (Libbie Dina Cohn, J.P. Sniadecki, 2012) Part of Harvard's ongoing experimental documentary film program "Sensory Ethnography Lab" @ The Black Hole (in Oakland)

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6. "Off the Screen: Let Your Light Shine with Jodie Mack" IN PERSON! Watching five beautiful 16mm prints of Mack's masterful collages was utterly inspiring including: New Fancy Foils (2013), Undertone Overture (2013), Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project (2013), Glistening Thrills (2013), Let Your Light Shine (2013) @ The Exploratorium in Pier 15.

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5. The Violent Men (Rudolph Maté, 1955) and Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957) Made on either side of John Ford's 1956 masterpiece The Searchers, these two melodrama westerns not only showcased one of my favorite actresses Barbara Stanwyck, the films themselves are now firmly two of my favorite westerns of all time. Screened @ The Stanford Theater.

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4.Two Seconds (Mervyn Le Roy, 1932) Film Noir connoisseur Elliot Lavine gave me an historical beating with this "proto-noir", "pre-code" performance by Edward G. Robinson. Truly left me gasping for air. Screened @ The Roxie Movie Theater part of "I Wake Up Dreaming 2014" series.

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3. Chan Is Missing (Wayne Wang, 1982) As soon as this deeply moving 16mm print ended, I went home and watched it again. Joe and Steve's relationship is truly priceless as are all of the San Francisco insights, which still relate to the city to this day. Screened @ The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts part of Joel Sheperd's "LEST WE FORGET: Remembering Radical San Francisco" film series

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2.Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Anderson, 2003) Life changing restored documentary. Sent me spiraling into all sorts of films made in Los Angeles from the "L.A. Rebellion movement" to Gregory Nava's El Norte (Guatemala/Mexico/US, 1983). Watch at any cost. Screened @ The Castro Movie Theatre

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1. Park Row (Sam Fuller, 1952), A Fuller Life (Samantha Fuller, 2013) and Pickup on South Street (Sam Fuller, 1953) Planned on only watching the rare 35mm print of Park Row but ended up staying for the whole mind blowing Triple Bill. Seek out his daughter's documentary. It is beautifully structured by stars reading huge passages from his book. Favorites included Tim Roth, Jennifer Beals, Joe Dante, Bill Duke, James Franco, William Friedkin, Mark Hamill and Buck Henry! While my mother fell in love with Richard Widmark during Pickup on South Street, I fell just as hard for Thelma Ritter as Moe which truly has to be one of the most amazing characters in film history. Screened @ The Castro Movie Theatre (Note the gust of wind that embraced my mother when taking the photo. We're pretty sure that it was Mr. Widmark himself.)

Once A Thief (1950)

WHO: June Havoc, the younger sister of Gypsy Rose Lee

WHAT: I haven't seen this, so let me reprint what my friend Ben Armington wrote about his experience seeing Once A Thief (on a double-bill with Anthony Mann's The Great Flamarion) two years ago: 

The co-feature, directed by Billy Wilder’s less heralded brother W. Lee Wilder, came equipped with a plot that Sirk or Fassbinder would have enjoyed torturing a complacent audience with: A down on her luck lady, played by June Havoc (what a name!), gets a chance to forget the past and go straight, but keeps on making bad choices, the fatal one being falling for an obviously untrustworthy clotheshorse con artist, played with excessive unctuosness by Cesar Romero. Amazing!

There's apparently even a scene or two set in (though I suspect not shot in) San Francisco, upping the interest for locals interested in portrayals of their city on film.

WHERE/WHEN: This evening at the Roxie as part of a program that starts at 6:30

WHY: Instead of announcing a film festival with a press conference, why not announce it with a screening? This idea's not a new one, but I believe tonight's the first time the Roxie's Director of Repertory Programming Elliot Levine has taken it up. Great news for noir fans who are excited to see what Levine has in store for his fourth annual I Wake Up Dreaming festival which runs May 10-23. Once A Thief screened at the 2011 edition of this festival, but I'm sure I wasn't the only one who missed it, and I'm sure there are plenty of folks who'll want to see it again, especially as it's paired with an ultra-rare 1950 noir television episode of Fireside Theatre called "The Green Convertable", starring Frances Dee.

HOW: Both films screen in a 16mm print.