All Through The Night (1941)

WHO: Humphrey Bogart.

WHAT: I have not seen All Through the Night. But my friend Miriam Montag (a film programmer herself; she's put together a show at Oddball Films for this Friday) has, and generously contributed her thoughts for Hell On Frisco Bay readers:

Nestled in his filmography between The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart is a politically myopic version of Rick Blaine, “Gloves” Donahue, a Broadway promoter straight from Damon Runyon, in a deceptively light entertainment. The first delirious part of All Through the Night seems to have genre-issues. The tough guy patter is broad, goofy and often veers into a hard-boiled version of Francis the Talking Mule. At the same time, the bodies start piling up. It's a bit like squawking that the strawberries under your Devon cream are the wrong size, but it does put the Noir fan on guard. What gives?   

It seems this hellzapoppin entertainment was aimed at those Americans who might, just like “Gloves”, ignore the front page. Europe isn’t just in flames, folks, there are darker deeds afoot. Bogart is beautifully dumbed down, an isolationist who needs to be reminded there’s a war on, who can barely pronounce the crazy names the Germans have given to the outposts where they are keeping their enemies. A film-goer would have to be a real schmoe to not awaken to the horrors along side our man about town. Such heavy going needs the all the help it can get to make its message palatable, and the entertainment appeal is applied with spades: the wisecracks are sure fire. You want a lilting Johnny Mercer title song? We’ve got one for you. It’s so loaded down with your second banana favorites, it's positively dizzying. 

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Roxie at 8:00.

WHY: Bogie appears on local cinema screens far less frequently than you might expect for a star with such an enduring and regenerating cult. To the best of my knowledge the next scheduled opportunities to see him in a communal screening situation will be when They Drive By Night and High Sierra play as part of the Pacific Film Archive's Raoul Walsh series this summer (precise dates TBA). 

For those who have already been attending the Roxie's I Wake Up Dreaming series this week, the appearance of Peter Lorre in All Through The Night makes for a three-night-run of movies featuring the sleepy-eyed actor. He was excellent in Sunday's Black Angel, practically carried the picture in last night's Island of Doomed Men, and won't be appearing in any more of the series titles over the next week and a half, so catch him while you can.

HOW: On a double-bill with a 35mm print of Nightmare, but projected digitally. Miriam Montag has a few words on that as well:

Roxie programmer Elliot Lavine has been trying to get a 35mm print out of Warners for years, without any luck so All Through the Night will screen digitally. If you want to miss out on Jackie Gleason’s fine performance as “Starchy” because it’s not on 35mm, fine. The rest of us will just move back a few rows.

Club Havana (1945)

WHO: Edgar G. Ulmer directed this.

WHAT: What Ulmer & his crew (including actor Tom Neal and director of photography Benjamin H. Kline) did during a few of the 51 weeks in 1945 that they weren't making Detour. Or so mythology might have us believe; there's a good deal of evidence tearing down some of the legend of the latter's six-day shoot and ultra-low budget. 

No matter. Club Havana is still the film Ulmer made just prior to his minimalist masterpiece, and thus of great interest to any fan of the versatile director. Before he died he told Peter Bogdanovich that he made it without a script- that he "did a Rossellini again"- surely a hindsight comparison, as Open City had not been seen even in Italy yet when this film was being made during the first half of 1945.

I haven't seen Club Havana- yet. But Doug Bonner has, so here's an excerpt from his piece on the picture:

Club Havana is a masterpiece, in that it is one of the most intensely gratifying low budget features of all time.  Most Poverty Row fare leaves you wishing for more:  better visuals, smoother performances, etc.  Club Havana leaves you with a sense of abundance.  It’s a sixty-three minute mashup of half a dozen plot lines with pauses for Latin music performed by a big band and a hip-swaying singer.   

But within this near-chaos, like all good film work, the movie sustains and completes itself inside the universe it manufactured:  rhumbas, rackets and all.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight at the Roxie, only at 6:40 and 9:30.

WHY: Everything I said about 16mm programming yesterday goes for today too. In fact it goes double, because Club Havana, despite having a far more famous director than Fall Guy's Reginald Le Borg, is probably an even more rarely-seen film.

HOW: 16mm print on a double-bill with the Peter Lorre vehicle Island of Doomed Men. 

Fall Guy (1947)

WHO: Cornell Woolrich wrote the story, "Cocaine", which this was based on.

WHAT: "Who did you kill? Why did you kill?" It's a staccato refrain that cuts through the black-and-white photography of the opening sequence, putting the audience, at least momentarily, in a disoriented state, desperate to learn what the cops barking these questions want to know- at least untl we remember the title of the film we're watching.

Since Woolrich's original title was too lurid to be used for an American film release in 1947, the title Fall Guy was used instead. Knowing this is the title of the film may rob it of some of it's mystery, as we know for sure that protagonist Tom Cochrane (played by Sean Penn's father Leo, billed as Clifford Penn) is an innocent victim and not a killer long before just about any of the film's other characters (including Tom himself) do. He wakes from a drink- (and drug- though which one is kept a vague secret to those not familiar with the source material) induced stupor, covered in someone else's blood, with a murder weapon in his hand. With no memory of his evident misdeed, he goes on the lam, aided by his friend Mac (Robert Armstrong) and his best girl Lois (Teala Loring), who has more faith in his innocence than he does, and resolves to help him retrace his steps to find the real killer and victim.

As a film made at the famous Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures, Fall Guy is neither conceptually unique (it's essentially a standard amnesia-fueled suspenser with a hint of The Lost Weekend) nor very remarkable in its execution. Rather, it's an utterly, exquisitely typical low budget programmer that features some lesser-known actors who rarely got to play truly meaty material, as well as some more familiar ones in colorful character roles; Elisha Cook Jr. plays an elevator operator (prefiguring his role in Don't Bother To Knock) and Iris Adrian makes up half of a demented pair of gambling addicts. Confirmed fans of B-noir in general, or of Woolrich adaptations in particular won't want to miss it. Those who demand more polish from movies may want to wait until next weekend for a Castro screening of the most famous (and justly so) adaptation of a Woolrich story, Rear Window. But there are a few connections between  the two film plots, most notably their shared ability to evoke the uncanny dread involved in entering a room you know you're not supposed to.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at the Roxie, at 1:30 and 6:15.

WHY: There are many things that distinguish Elliot Lavine's annual I Wake Up Dreaming festival of film noir titles made from the 1940s through the early 1960s, from other noir celebrations like Eddie Muller's traveling Noir City. Perhaps the most distinctive difference is the inclusion of 16mm projections. Muller's festival is built around locating 35mm and, thus far to a lesser extent, DCP copies of classic noir titles, often presented in new restorations, but this places limits on the depth of film titles available to be plunged in programming. When a 16mm print has run at Noir City, it was always a last-minute replacement for a 35mm print that turned out to be unprojectable, and since the Castro pulled its 16mm equipment out of the booth several years ago, these late-game switches (as with The Lady Gambles at Noir City 9) are now saved by DVD and not 16mm presentations. 

But 16mm prints can look great, especially in a more intimate house like the Roxie's. And so many worthy titles unavailable on 35mm or DCP can be shown using the format, thanks to the network of film collectors that a programmer like Lavine can tap into. Not that Lavine isn't equally adept at wringing great 35mm prints out of studio archives as well. But it's the flexibility of multiple formats that allows programs like today's Woolrich triple-bill, which includes 35mm prints of The Black Angel and Night Has A Thousand Eyes as well as a very nice 16mm copy of Fall Guy (that I was able to preview at a press screening a few weeks ago) to be possible at the Roxie.

HOW: 16mm, as part of a triple-bill detailed just above.

The Place Beyond The Pines (2012)

WHO: Mike Patton composed much of the music for this film.

WHAT: The term "neo-noir" gets thrown around an awful lot, often being applied to any modern film that involves criminals and detectives, especially if they're interacting in urban settings providing opportunities to shoot in darkened alleyways and corridors. But the original noir cycle had social and even political signifiers that went beyond the professions or criminal predilections of its characters, or their visual schemes. These films (which were not always set in big cities) were an American manifestation of the existential angst brought upon by the social and moral uncertainties associated with World War II and its horrors.

So to truly earn the term "neo-noir", I think modern films probably need to somehow reflect the specific social and moral uncertainties of our own time, putting their characters into existential crises and exploring the psychological underpinnings of their actions. They can't be simple caper or heist films, or cops & robbers shoot-'em-ups. The Place Beyond The Pines, I think, is one of the few true "neo-noir" films I've seen in recent years, by this definition. I went into it not knowing much about it and I think it's probably best if others do too, so I'm not going to say much about it's plot. 

The film doesn't look (or, thanks to the excellent musical soundtrack, sound) much like what usually gets labeled as "neo-noir". It's decidedly anti-urban, being set in a relatively small upstate New York town, all the better to create a believable microcosm of interconnected human relationships. It's indeed a film all about human relationships, particularly those between fathers and sons, and it mirrors some of the greatest classic noirs in that characters are essentially trapped by their own circumstances and feel fated to make precisely the errors they want so desperately to avoid. It's a lovely, and for me quite moving, film.

WHERE/WHEN: It's screening at more than a dozen Frisco Bay cinemas this week, both arthouse and multiplex, with multiple showtimes each day. I'd like to particularly highlight it's booking at the 4-Star, where it shows 3-4 times daily through this Thursday.

WHY: With the San Francisco International Film Festival receding from view, it might be a good time to catch up with theatrical releases that you weren't able to catch during the festival or the run-up to it. If you waited this long to see The Place Beyond The Pines you're in luck that this shot-on-35mm film only just yesterday became available to view locally via a 35mm print (at the 4-Star only, I believe). It's becoming an increasingly common trend for a film's initial release to local theatres to be a digital one, with a 35mm print appearing only weeks later. Patience can be rewarded for those who like to see their films screened on film. Although we're still waiting to see a print of To The Wonder, for instance.

Additionally, if you liked or even loathed the festival's presentation of the silent Waxworks with a newly-commissioned score by four musicians including Patton, your interest in seeing a film to which he contributed musical accompaniment, with the blessing of its director, may be stoked for comparison purposes. 

Finally, with the Roxie having just embarked on a two-week exploration of classic noir back streets and underpassages (check out Pam Grady's article on the Roxie series if you haven't yet), it may be just the right week to try and fit in a viewing of The Place Beyond The Pines, as a comparison point with the wartime and post-war films being shown there, and so you can let me know what you think of my own reaction to it as an authentic neo-noir piece.

HOW: 35mm print at the 4-Star, but I believe all other theatres are screening via DCP.

Laura (1944)

WHO: This was Otto Preminger's breakthrough as a producer and director.

WHAT: Most movie lovers have seen Laura. But there's seeing a movie and seeing it. I had popped in a VHS of Laura many years ago when I was first starting to deliberately acquaint myself with film noir, and I enjoyed it and forgot about it, for the longest time thinking of it as an acceptable but probably somewhat overrated example of the genre.

Seeing it last year at the Noir City festival, however, I realized how much I'd misremembered it. Seeing on a small screen, the only elements I'd really remembered were its genteel New York milieu and some vague sense of it as a whodunit. It took watching it from a seat in a low row of the Castro Theatre to sear the film's deep cynicism, its undercurrent of physical and emotional violence, and its remarkable mise-en-scène into my skull. It was like seeing it for the first time and recognizing just why it, along with Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet, played such a role in establishing fatalistic, even disturbing films as a major part of almost every Hollywood studio's production slate in the mid-to-late 1940s. I don't want to say much else, in case you haven't really seen Laura in a long time either, and might be able to take part in its pleasures tonight unsullied by too many expectations.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. Show starts at 8:00.

WHY: There are three classic noir films screening in three different Frisco Bay theatres tonight, all made at the Twentieth Century Fox studio. I Wake Up Screaming is the first of thirty titles of varying degrees of rarity, set to screen over the next two weeks at the Roxie; check out Dennis Harvey's excellent preview for more details on the film and the series. Niagara is, in my book, a somewhat better film, an unusual technicolor noir featuring Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters, and of course Marilyn Monroe. It screens on a Stanford Theatre double-bill also including the color and cinemascope noir A Kiss Before Dying (which is not from Fox, nor have I seen it before).

But Laura is not only the most famous but the best film of the three, in my book. It kicks off the summer season of screenings at the only cinema around that makes the Castro seem a bit humdrum by comparison. The Paramount only occasionally shows movies, so when they play something I've never seen on the big screen, or something good enough to see multiple times, I try to go. Laura qualifies in the latter category, while The Graduate (which plays June 21) and Being There (July 19) qualify under the former. It might be worth seeing Godzilla on that screen, depending on the version being shown (crossing my fingers for an original Japanese-language print) August 9, and just because I've seen North By Northwest on that giant screen before doesn't mean I won't be tempted again August 23rd.

HOW: Laura screens in a 35mm print along with vintage newsreel, cartoon, and trailer(s).