Border Incident (1949)

WHO: Anthony Mann directed this.

WHAT: I shall quote the opening sentence from the beautiful Noir City 12 program guide which I just received upon arrival at the Castro yesterday evening:

Two cops -- one from Mexico (Ricardo Montalban) and one from the U.S. (George Murphy) -- put their lives on the line as they go undercover to bust up ruthless gangs on both sides of the border that prey on undocumented Mexican braceros. 

WHERE/WHEN: High noon today at the Castro Theatre, and 8:40PM Friday, February 21st at the Pacific Film Archive.

WHY: I'm not going to be putting up posts about films featured in this year's Noir City festival every day between now and next Sunday when it ends (I have another project planned for this space, not wholly unrelated to Noir City), but I just can't resist sharing the above DVD screen capture. This is John Alton cinematography at simultaneously its most picturesque and threatening, and if it doesn't make you want to see it projected in 35mm I don't know what's wrong with you.

I don't talk much about Border Incident in my recent Fandor article about this year's Noir City, which I know I linked here yesterday but will urge you once again to read if you haven't yet. Other Noir City articles that I've not yet linked on this blog include Dennis Harvey's SF Bay Guardian article, and another interview with festival founder Eddie Muller. Anyway, I think Border Incident is an ideal way to kick off a day of five (rounding up when you count the small Mexico-related portion of Too Late For Tears) Mexico-themed noir films including two made within that country's industry. Anthony Mann made quite a number of films involving Mexico and Mexican-Americans, from his 1956 drama Serenade to Westerns like The Furies and Man of the West, to the Mexico City-set noir The Great Flamarion, which screened a few years ago at a Hollywood-goes-to-Mexico noir series at the Pacific Film Archive.  But Border Incident contains elements of all these genres and perhaps one more, the "semi-documentary" subgenre of noir that was popular in the late 1940s. 

Last night's pairing of Journey Into Fear and The Third Man was a Castro sell-out. I'm curious to see if the numbers will hold up throughout the week. I hope they will, but do wonder if more than a few fans wish the festival featured more Hollywood noir along the lines they're used to. Perhaps they'll come out instead for the Castro's February 9th double-bill of famous Rita Hayworth noirs set at least partially in the Latin American countries Noir City is showcasing: Lady From Shanghai, with its famous scenes set in Mexico, and Gilda, set in Argentina. I hesitate to tell them about the seven-title Anthony Mann crime film series coming to the PFA next month. It includes Border Incident and six others, including three more shot by Alton.

HOW: Border Incident screens on a triple-bill with Roberto Gavaldón's In The Palm of Your Hand and Emilio Fernández's Victims of Sin at the Castro today, and will screen the same day as Mann's He Walked By Night (though as a separate admission) at the PFA next month.

The Third Man (1949)

WHO: Graham Greene wrote the screenplay for this film.

WHAT: As Imogen Sara Smith recently wrote,

The Third Man possesses intoxicating style and at the same time dissects the ease with which style can trump substance in the movies—the way, in film noir especially, glamour and aesthetic bliss can set one’s moral compass spinning. In the film’s tilting, labyrinthine world, beauty and corruption, cruelty and charm blend as smoothly as coffee and cream. It’s a world of splendor and rubble, leprous baroque apartments in half-gutted buildings, bleak fairgrounds and tired gypsy cafes. Anton Karas’s famous zither score, jaunty and wistful, imbues a mood of wry detachment and haunting nostalgia.

WHERE/WHEN: Screen tonight only at 9:00 at the Castro Theatre.

WHY: Of all the films screening at this year's Noir City film festival running tonight through Sunday, February 2nd at its traditional Castro Theatre home, The Third Man is the most widely-known and critically-regarded. At least in the English-speaking world it is, that is. For the first time in the festival's history, it's showing a majority of foreign-language noirs among its program, fulfilling the wishes of cinephiles who have long hoped that films from France, Mexico, Japan, etc. might find a place under the festival's spectacular tent. I doubt I'm alone in hoping that this year's Noir City edition is at least as successful as ever with audiences, in the hopes that future editions might find more room for more noir from more countries. (Italy? Egypt? Finland? Thailand? I know they're out there.)

I've written about this year's festival and the international history of noir in an article published at Keyframe yesterday (other articles on the festival so far include Smith's, Sura Wood's, preview, and G. Allen Johnson's interview with festival director Eddie Muller), but my efforts to drum up interest in this year's festival won't stop there. Though I've sen The Third Man countless times (including a 35mm Castro screening less than two years ago) I plan to go again tonight. I imagine there will be folks attending who are excited to see the Third Man but may be on the fence about attending the rest of the festival because they're unsure about their interest in foreign-language films they may not have heard of before. I'm hoping my enthusiasm for favorites like Stray Dog, Quai des Orfèvres a.k.a. Jenny L'Amour, etc. might rub off on some of these fence-sitters and encourage them to take a chance on the rest of the program. The Third Man seems an ideal choice to open this international edition of Noir City, not only because it's a great movie that's never screened previously at Noir City, but also because Graham Greene is a perfect bridge to European noir for the Hollywood noir fan. Influential American films like This Gun For Hire and Ministry of Fear were based upon his novels, and are quite consistent with the British noirs he was responsible for once becoming a screenwriter: Brighton Rock (also screening at Noir City this week), The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man.

HOW: On a double-bill with Journey Into Fear, both screening from 35mm prints.

Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948)

WHO: Joan Fontaine, who died last month at the age of 96, stars in this.

WHAT: An exquisite masterpiece. Read Farran Nehme (a.k.a. the the Self-Styled Siren)'s wonderful article on it.

WHERE/WHEN: Today at the Stanford Theatre at 3:45 and 7:30.

WHY: Bless the Stanford for its flexibility; it was able to put together a four-film program of Fontaine films as a quick fill-in between the end of its last Preston Sturges/Marx Brothers program, and it's next program, and this is the final day to see her incredible face in close-up on their big screen.

The next Stanford series begins Friday, and is devoted to Frank Capra. For about seven weeks the theatre will run multiple-night stands of all of Capra's 1930s and 1940s features except for four (Rain Or Shine, Broadway Bill, and the recently-screened Lady For A Day and It's a Wonderful Life are the only no-shows from this period). The venue will also spend two nights apiece showing his top-notch Why We Fight documentaries from his World War II service (February 12-13) and his Bell Telephone Science films including Hemo the Magnificent and more (February 19-20). Best of all, the venue will hold six screenings of two of Capra's silent films, with live musical accompaniment by Dennis James on Wurlitzer organ. Both That Certain Thing (January 24-26) and The Power of the Press (January 29-30) are very rarely revived, and were not part of the last, silent-heavy, Capra retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive in 2010.

Dennis James will be returning to the South Bay March 14th to accompany Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac at the California Theatre in San Jose, as part of the Cinequest Film Festival.

HOW: Letter From An Unknown Woman screens on a double-bill with Fontaine's own favorite role in The Constant Nymph, both in 35mm.

Kid Auto Races At Venice, Cal. (1914)

WHO: Charlie Chaplin starred in this.

WHAT: The second film featuring Chaplin ever to have been released, and the first in which he wore the outfit he's been best known for ever since. As I wrote in a new piece on Chaplin published at Fandor (where it and Chaplin's other Keystone films are available to stream) yesterday,

This was the first audience for Chaplin in what would soon be known as his Little Tramp costume, which he’d put together just days prior to film the first shots of Mabel’s Strange Predicament, and we see the crowd reacting to his wanderings on the track, near-misses with racers, and battles with Lehrman and others to get closer to the camera so he can mug more effectively. Most of them appear delighted by his antics, although some shield their own faces from the machine’s stare. They realize just as much as Chaplin’s “odd character,” as he is called in a title card, that the camera can document them for a certain amount of posterity (surely nobody guessed a hundred years), and have an opposite reaction.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today at the Castro Theatre at 4PM, and at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont at 7:30 PM.

WHY: Today is the precisely 100th anniversary of the day when a small movie crew including Chaplin and director Henry Lehrman went to a racetrack at the popular resort town of Venice, California, and shot this film. Chaplin's "Little Tramp" character had already been captured on film by now, in a few shots for Mabel's Strange Predicament probably taken the day before. But the "Little Tramp" had never been seen by the public until January 11th, 1914. And since Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. was shot in a single day it beat Mabel's Strange Predicament to the screen by a couple of days.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is screening Kid Auto Races At Venice, Cal. as one small part of its day-long Chaplin event today. For more reading on Chaplin produced for the festival, check out the link round-up on the SFSFF blog, and another Keyframe piece, Jonathan Marlowe's interview with Timothy Brock, who will be leading a small orchestra for two of today's three programs. You can also hear him speak about that on this podcast.

Meanwhile, the Niles screening tonight is the second installment in a year-long project to show every one of Chaplin's 1914 films in chronological order, in 16mm, at that venue.

HOW: Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. screens in 35mm at the Castro, before a DCP showing of The Kid with live music by Timothy Brock and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. It screens along with two more shorts, Ghost Town: the Story of Fort Lee and Crazy Like A Fox, as well as a feature film also celebrating its centennial, The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England , a 2012 inductee to the National Film Registry directed by Maurice Tourneur. All the Niles films will screen on 16mm with piano accompaniment by Bruce Loeb.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

WHO: Joel and Ethan Coen wrote, directed, produced, and (under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) edited this.

WHAT: My favorite new Coen Brothers film since No Country For Old Men at least, and perhaps going as far back as their last folk-music-centric film O Brother, Where Art Thou? And though I've seen it only once, I rank it a tentative #10 on my top 10 list of films for the year (the first time a Coen film has made my annual list since I began compiling them, I think). See below for more on that, and for a link to a full-fledged review of the film.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple showtimes daily for the foreseeable future at various Frisco Bay theatres including the Embarcadero, Kabuki & Empire in San Francisco, the Piedmont in Oakland, the California in Berkeley, the Camera 7 in Campbell, and the Sequoia in Mill Valley, among others.

WHY: I picked the above screen capture (from the trailer to Inside Llewyn Davis) not only because it was one of my favorite shots in the film, but because I knew I'd be using the occasion of this post to roll out my annual year-end-lists of new movies seen in 2013. And the sentiment seems apropos for a post that feels in some ways as thought-out, ill-judged, and pregnant with indeterminate permanence as a graffiti scrawl.

This post also completes my experiment of putting a post-a-day about a local Frisco Bay screening up on this blog every day in 2013- more on that endeavor in a future post, I promise, but for now I'll say that the process definitely altered my viewing patterns for the year.  I found myself watching even more repertory and experimental films to the exclusion of new films than I usually have, and more commercial US fare than foreign films. I also, for the first time since 2005, didn't venture out of Frisco Bay to any film festivals this year, which I suspect has had a hand in shaping the character of this list as a whole. Finally, I made less time to rewatch favorite new films, which makes this selection feel a bit more shaped by first impressions than usual. This means the ordering of the list beyond #1 is fairly arbitrary, and that the runners-up may have some claim on some of the lower-rung slots.

On the other hand, because I was filling content for my blog every day, I ended up writing at least a few words, and sometimes a few more than that, on each of these films placed on my top 10. I have linked the appropriate article, and, since these writings are basically informal musings of varying lengths, added a link to a particularly favored review by someone who has taken the time and thought to craft a serious critical piece on each in my top ten.

1. Leviathan (Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor) - Max Goldberg
2. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach) - Vadim Rizov
3. Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami) - Kenji Fujishima
4. The Place Beyond The Pines (Derek Cianfrance) - Michael Sicinski
5. Drug War (Johnnie To) Hua Hsu
6. 12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen) - ReBecca Theodore-Vachon
7. The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski) - Ryland Walker Knight
8. All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor) Dana Stevens
9. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth) - Cheryl Eddy
10. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) - Adam Nayman

Runners-up, alphabetically by title: At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman), Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski) Metallica Through the Never (Nimród Antal), Our Nixon (Penny Lane), Passion (Brian De Palma), The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)

Ten (as far as I know) undistributed favorites, alphabetically by title: Big Joy: the James Broughton (Stephen Silha, Eric Slade & Dawn Logsdon) Bright Mirror (Paul Clipson), Dusty Stacks of Mom (Jodie Mack), Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 8 (Rick Prelinger), My Way To Olympia (Niko von Glasow), The Realist (Scott Stark), The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher), Tokyo Family (Yoji Yamada), Verses (James Sansing), Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang)

HOW: Inside Llewyn Davis has digital showings only, which is a shame because it was shot on 35mm by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, and is rumored to be the last Coen Brothers film to be shot on film (Delbonnel has already stepped into the digital world with next year's shot-in-North Beach release Big Eyes). Or perhaps it's not such a shame after all, as the Coens note they edit digitally and in fact pioneered the use of digital intermediates with  O Brother, Where Art Thou?)