Shockproof (1949)

Screen capture from Cinema Guild DVD release of Los Angeles Plays Itself.

WHO: Douglas Sirk directed this, from a screenplay written by Sam Fuller.

WHAT: I've never seen this film before, so let me pull a few sentences of synopsis from the collector-worthy glossy program booklet given to every attendee of the Noir City festival this week:

Jenny Marsh is freed from prison after serving five years for the "self-defense" killing of a man who tried to murder her larcenous lover. Her parole officer, Griff Marat, takes pity and helps her arrange a new life on the straight-and-narrow. But Jenny proves too desirable for Griff's own good, and he impulsively marries the ex-con--a parole violation that makes them fugitives! More bad news--Jenny's shifty boyfriend is still in the picture.

WHERE/WHEN: Today only at 2:00 and 7:30 at the Castro, presented as part of Noir City 13.

WHY: Friday night's presentation of a six-minute video showcasing then-and-now comparisons of exterior location shots from Woman on the Run with their modern-day counterparts. Some places like the army/navy surplus stores on the Embarcadero, had disappeared entirely and were even hissed by some audience members. Others, like Fisherman's Wharf, had changed only superficially since 1950. But the audience reaction was most vociferous for the shots that in fact had been taken not in San Francisco at all, but in Southern California; namely, the final rollercoaster and midway section shot, not in Playland at the Beach as is often assumed, but Ocean Park Pier off Santa Monica, and the opening hillside murder location, which was actually filmed in the bunker hill area of Los Angeles. I highly recommend watching Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself for more context on this fascinatingly frequent film noir location. It's also where the above shot from Shockproof was filmed, and I'm excited to see it pop up again in the festival. Wonder how many more times it will this week...

HOW: 35mm, on a double-bill with Sirk's 1948 film Sleep My Love, produced by Mark Pickford(!)

Suspicion (1941)

WHO: Joan Fontaine is the only person ever to have won an Academy Award for performing in a picture directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She won the Best Actress award over Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Greer Garson and, most famously, her sister Olivia de Havilland.

WHAT: Hitchcock's third film made after moving to California from England was set entirely in England but used some shots of Northern California in its construction, although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the actors never had to leave the studio, as every shot looks like it could have been completed using stand-ins, rear-projections and/or backdrops. I wrote a bit about the key scene in my Keyframe Daily write-up focusing on Noir City selections involving San Francisco and Monterey County settings:

In Suspicion, another Noir City 13 pick featuring Joan Fontaine, perilous Big Sur cliffs stood in for coastal England in the scene where Fontaine investigates a site where her deceitful husband (Cary Grant) has taken cheerful investor in a potential real-estate venture to inspect—or is it to be murdered?  No series of marriage-themed films could be complete without an example of Hitchcock, who returned to the subject repeatedly throughout his career

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 1:30 today only at the Castro Theatre, courtesy of the Noir City festival.

WHY: While all but three of the Noir City 13 selections (last night's Woman on the Run, tonight's The Suspect, and Wednesday's Crime of Passion) have never been screened before at the festival's San Francisco iterations, I believe that Suspicion is one of ten titles in the festival that go one further: they've never shown at Noir City events hosted in any city. I have a feeling that impresario Eddie Muller is just a hair more curious to see how Suspicion and the other nine films will play in front of an audience he's assembled than he is about some of the others which have screened at his events in Hollywood or elsewhere before. Those nine according to my (unverified) records: The Thin Man, After the Thin Man, The Set-Up, Clash By Night, The Sleeping Tiger, The Guilty, Les Diaboliques, Seconds and the Honeymoon Killers.

Today actually offers some tough choices for noir lovers, as there are no less than four films screening at the Castro, but also a 35mm print of Double Indemnity at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive as part of its half-film, half-digital Billy Wilder series. (The next 35mm print in that series is The Lost Weekend January 30). And the Alfred Hitchcock series at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto is showing one of his most noir-ish of films (perhaps even moreso than Suspicion), Notorious. At least that one repeats tomorrow, so a true obsessive could theoretically attend the Sunday matinees of Douglas Sirk's Shockproof and Sleep, My Love and then head down the peninsula in time to see the 9:35 showing of Notorious (you might even be able to make it to To Catch a Thief at 7:30). Being carless, I'm not going to do that myself, but I am trying to figure out how to squeeze a viewing of one of the last few Hitchcock films I've never seen before, Young and Innocent, into next weekend without missing too many of the Noir City festivities. Public transportation schedules won't allow me to see that reputedly wonderful Hitchcock film without missing out on either Edward Dmytryk's The Hidden Room on Thursday, the new Film Noir Foundation restoration of The Guilty on Friday, Luchino Visconti's Ossessione AND either Cry Terror! or Les Diaboliques next Saturday, or else The Honeymoon Killers next Sunday. Of these, I've only seen Ossessione before. Right now I'm leaning towards skipping The Hidden Room but if anyone wants to speak up for it I'm all ears. Noting that there's at least one strongly marital-themed Hitchcock film playing at the Stanford almost every weekend of its eight-week series makes me wish the latter venue had waited just a couple weeks to start their series out of conflict with Noir City: 'Til Death Do Us Part.

HOW: According to the Film On Film Foundation website, every Noir City selection this year will be screened on 35mm prints except for Friday night's No Man Of Her Own. Suspicion screens on a double-bill with Ida Lupino's The Bigamist.

Woman on the Run (1950)

image supplied by Film Noir Foundation

WHO: Ann Sheridan (who was born 100 years ago this February 21st) stars in this, and was also an uncredited co-producer.

WHAT: As I wrote in a Keyframe Daily article previewing the Noir City film festival, published yesterday:

Ann Sheridan plays the hard-boiled spouse of a failed artist who has gone into hiding after witnessing a murder. She attempts to track him down using old sketchbooks of neighborhood inhabitants as clues to his whereabouts, while trying to evade detectives and newspapermen trying to get to him first. If her wanderings across city hills into various dives feel particularly authentic to San Francisco’s character, perhaps it’s because the cinematographer was a native son, Hal Mohr, who’d filmed extensively here. (His credits include the notorious The Last Night of the Barbary Coast for Sol Lesser in 1913.) Director Norman Foster, best known for his collaborations with Orson Welles, had also made his transition from actor to director in a 1936 San Francisco film called I Cover Chinatown. Woman on the Run is a completely unpretentious, excellent thriller and a genuine Noir City discovery making its long-awaited reappearance at the festival after the last copy was thought destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

Here's a link to my piece on the Universal fire at the time it happened, and more importantly, a candid 2010 interview with Eddie Muller about his exchanges with the studio after that event. I also must link to Brian Hollins's terrific Reel SF page for this film, which guides us through the specific San Francisco (and Southern California) locations where it was filmed.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:30 tonight only at the Castro Theatre as part of Noir City.

WHY: With yesterday's re-opening of the Pacific Film Archive for the Spring semester coinciding with a new Stanford Theatre Alfred Hitchcock retrospective, the new Frisco Bay repertory film year is now officially underway (although I've already seen some fine revival programs at the Exploratorium, the Castro, and Oddball Films, and regretfully missed some at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum)  I usually like to at least start my annual I Only Have Two Eyes survey of the prior year's repertory scene before the start of Noir City, but a combination of that festival starting early and my soliciting entries later than I'd hoped means that's not happening this year. But I'm hard at work compiling and you'll soon start seeing the results posted here. Just not before tonight's thrilling kick-off to ten days of 35mm noir heaven at the Castro.

As Noir City honcho Eddie Muller told G. Allen Johnson recently, tonight's festival opener Woman on the Run was the genesis of this year's "Unholy Matrimony" theme. I tried to avoid hinting at spoilers in my Keyframe article on the festival, so I didn't talk much about the marriage angle of the film in the above-quoted paragraph, but suffice to say (still eschewing revealing anything specific to those who might not have seen the film) Woman on the Run presents a really interesting portrayal of wedlock circa 1950. It's an ideal opener for so many reasons, and of the films in the festival I've seen before, it's the one I'm most excited to see again (followed closely by the Tuesday night Robert Ryan double bill and the Wednesday night Barbara Stanwyck bill, which is an exact duplicate of one I saw at the Stanford last April). Partly I'm so excited to see Woman on the Run on the big screen because in 2014 I moved into an apartment overlooking one of the locations where it was shot. To think Ann Sheridan was captured on film walking below my kitchen window sixty-five years ago! I can't wait to see that particular scene, and in fact the whole film again in what I expect will be a gorgeous 35mm print a zillion times more clear than the available DVD and youtube versions.

HOW: Woman on the Run screens from a newly-struck, never publicly projected, 35mm print on a double-bill with an archival 35mm print of what I'm pretty certain was Nicholas Ray's only film set in San Francisco: Born to be Bad.

The Thin Man (1934)

WHO: Dashiell Hammett wrote the novel this was based upon, first published in six consecutive issues of Redbook magazine in 1933 and early 1934.

WHAT: The Thin Man is one of those classic Hollywood movies that has little to no formal notability, but that stands out from the sea of studio-system potboilers by dint of character and tone. Its central characters are a married couple: a retired detective (William Powell) and his equally sleuth-like wife (Myrna Loy). Their marriage is one of the screen's most unique and beloved, for reasons that Brian Eggert gets into very well:

Nick and Nora’s blissful union is a rarity for onscreen marriages, even more so upon the film’s release in 1934, just two years after the end of Prohibition. Cinemas were filled with morality tales, further restricted by the recently established Production Code. But Nick and Nora’s penchant for drink isn’t represented as a kink in their marriage or a grand social problem; rather, it’s a social lubricant that greases the film’s funniest lines. A reporter asks Nick about the murder mystery: "Can't you tell us anything about the case?" and Nick replies, "Yes, it's putting me way behind in my drinking." Alcohol fuels their carefree party lifestyle, sustained by Nora’s moneyed background and Nick’s plan to live happily off his wife’s bank account. None of the usual insecurities apply—he’s comfortable with the fact that his wife’s the breadwinner, and her only complaint might be that her husband is less exciting when he’s not serving as a private detective.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at the Castro Theatre today at 3:00 and 7:00, and, presented as part of the thirteenth annual Noir City festival on January 19th at 2:00 and 7:00. Also at the Balboa Theatre January 22nd at 7:30 PM.

WHY: It's been almost two weeks since the Noir City XIII program was announced at an annual Christmas-themed screening at the Castro. With ten different holiday-connected mid-twentieth-century films screened in five Decembers, one might wonder if Noir City impresario Eddie Muller and his curatorial companion Anita Monga are running out of "noir" films appropriate to the occasion. And indeed, the "noir" elements to this year's pairing of O. Henry's Full House and The Curse of the Cat People were clearly outweighed by their seasonal elements. Three out of five of the O. Henry adaptations are winter-set, and one explicitly about Christmas, while only one contains a character we might expect to see in a "straight" noir- Richard Widmark's safecracker in "The Clarion Call", often cited as a reprise of his career-launching Tommy Udo character from Kiss of Death. Meanwhile The Curse of the Cat People, while a beautiful depiction of a family experiencing shifting seasons in New England, resists all classification usually attempted on it, whether as a horror picture, a sequel, or as Muller noted from the stage in his introduction, a B-movie; it wears the "noir" label no more comfortably.

So it's a bit of a surprise to see a Yuletime-set detective film like The Thin Man programmed as part of Noir City's main event in January, knowing it could've been "saved up" for a future December showing. I'm guessing it's also unprecedented for a Noir City selection to be shown so shortly after a Castro booking arranged by the "regular" venue programming team headed up by Keith Arnold. But there's surely a reason or two why The Thin Man simply had to be screened at this year's edition of Noir City and I'm here to tease out some possible culprits. 

First, The Thin Man has never screened at a Noir City festival before, not even at the daylong Dashiell Hammett tribute in 2012. What better year for it to make its debut than a year in which the festival theme is "'Til Death Do Us Part"? In the midst of a week and a half of nearly two dozen films celebrating some of the worst marriages in cinema history, it may be necessary to have a day set aside for perhaps the most memorably positive matrimonial depiction dreamed up by Hollywood. Contra the information in the first sentence of the last paragraph of this preview article, Muller and Monga have placed The Thin Man a third of the way into the festival, timed perfectly as a breather after a weekend of infidelities, murders, and other impediments to wedded bliss. 

Second, The Thin Man and especially its double-bill-mate sequel After the Thin Man fit snugly into a sub-theme running through much of this year's festival: San Francisco. After last year's international noir celebration in which almost all of the 27 films shown were set (and often shot) abroad, it was a natural to make Noir City XIII a real homecoming, with more films made in or about Northern California than any festival since 2003's inaugural edition. The festival kicks January 16th off with the big discovery from that festival, Woman on the Run, which I expect will permanently solidify its place in the canon of San Francisco noirs with this newly-premiering restoration funded by the Film Noir Foundation (and Noir City ticket sales). Also on that bill is the 1950 Nick Ray film Born To Be Bad, which is set in San Francisco but, unlike Woman on the Run, was not filmed here. Other films that either a) were set partially in San Francisco, Monterey, or otherwise north of the San Luis Obispo county line, b) were at least in part filmed in this region, or c) both, include both halves of the January 17 Joan Fontaine matinee of Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion and Ida Lupino's The Bigamist, of the can't-miss January 21 Barbara Stanwyck pairing of Clash By Night and Crime of Passion, and, I'm told, the January 24th Doris Day noir Julie. There may be other San Francisco connections throughout the festival (I've been clued in that my hometown somehow figures into another Stanwyck selection I've yet to see for myself called No Man of Her Own). The Thin Man's protagonists are, like Hammett himself, San Francisco residents, but in the original film the action is all in New York City, where they are vacationing. It's not until After the Thin Man that they return home and we get to see unprocessed shots of William Powell and Myrna Loy walking up Telegraph Hill and driving down Market Street.

Finallly, for the first time since 2006 the Noir City festival will be held during the week of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, meaning that unlike in recent years in which Monday night selections were often obscurities aimed at hardcore noir-heads, it makes sense to program a famous, crowd-pleasing title on a day which many potential attendees will be able to attend as a weekday matinee if they prefer that to evening showings. And those who might wish the Castro was screening films that wrangle with issues of civil rights and the ideals of Dr. King on his honorary day may at least approve that The Thin Man was shot by pioneering Asian-American cinematographer James Wong Howe, and that some of its key creators like Hammett and Loy were involved as white allies in civil rights struggles. But though Noir City has in the past hosted an "African-American noir" night, and even once planned to bring Harry Belafonte to town for screenings of Odds Against Tomorrow and Kansas City (he sent his regrets over video instead), the first few early years of the festival never involved thematic programs on the MLK holiday itself, and this year's programming above all continues that pattern.

HOW: Todays screening of The Thin Man is on a double-bill with a Marx Brothers comedy that I probably wouldn't want to see on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, A Day at the Races. Both films screen in 35mm.

The format for next month's Noir City screening of The Thin Man has not yet been revealed on the program website, nor via the reliable Bay Area Film Calendar. Curiously, only six of the twenty-five Noir City XIII film titles are listed on the Film Noir Foundation website as involving 35mm film: Woman on the Run and its fellow FNF restoration The Guilty, an archival print of Born to Be Bad, and restorations of The Bigamist, Douglas Sirk's Sleep, My Love, and the Max Ophüls masterpiece Caught. It's too early to read too much into this, as there are plenty of reasons why it might be so (including an uncharacteristic sloppiness on the part of designers). 

Perhaps these six prints are merely the ones with the most interesting pedigrees; other films in the program might be 35mm but simple release prints and not archival or restorations. It's also possible that these six are the only ones confirmed as 35mm, and that other formats are up in the air at this time, although it would surprise me to find out that rarities like, say, Joseph Losey's The Sleeping Tiger (part of an "American expatriate directors in Britain" night Jan. 22) or Luchino Visconti's career-launching James M. Cain adaptation Ossessione (screening with Les Diabolique Jan. 24 as an extension of last year's international noir foray) might be available in both high-quality 35mm and digital versions. But it's perhaps preferable to leave a format unannounced than to announce a 35mm print that might turn out not to appear (like the Castro did when listing this Sunday's Age of Innocence screening as 35mm on its "coming soon" page, only for it to become DCP when the actual January calendar was published). The possibility that the six mentioned titles will be the only ones screened on 35mm in the whole festival would be a rude shock for the many celluloid-loyal dwellers of Noir City's alleyways, but seems highly doubtful if only for the fact that a 35mm print of one of the other nineteen films on the program, The Thin Man, is screening today at the very same venue, if under a different aegis.

I believe the Balboa Theatre screening of The Thin Man will be digital, as the series of classics the venue is presenting is made up entirely of movies available via DCP. But the Balboa does retain 35mm capability and occasionally utilizes it, so it would be best to double-check the Bay Area Film Calendar shortly before the show date to see if it appears on it. If it does, expect a print after all.

UPDATE January 1, 2015: According to the Film On Film Foundation all Noir City screenings but one (No Man of Her Own on Friday, January 23) are expected to screen in 35mm, including The Thin Man!

O. Henry's Full House (1952)

Screen shot from 20th Century Fox DVD.

WHO: Five different directors, three named Henry (King, Koster and Hathaway) and two others (Howard Hawks & Jean Negulesco) each directed a different short story by O. Henry.

WHAT: I haven't seen this film yet; I somehow missed it the last time it screened locally, at the Stanford Theatre's 2012 Howard Hawks festival. I love the idea of Hawks adapting "The Ransom of Red Chief"- putting him in the excellent company of Yasujiro Ozu. I also am tickled picturing Henry Koster directing Marilyn Monroe and his It Started With Eve star Charles Laughton in "The Cop and the Anthem". I don't remember O. Henry's stories "The Clarion Call" or "The Last Leaf" well enough to imagine Henry Hathaway directing Richard Widmark, or Jean Negulesco directing Anne Baxter, as they did here.

But the O. Henry story that's been most deeply-ingrained in me is of course the heartbreakingly ironic Yuletide tale "The Gift of the Magi", which in this film was helmed by Henry King and featured Farley Granger and Jeanne Crain (pictured above). Like "The Clarion Call" and "The Cop and the Anthem" it had been filmed previously in 1909 by D.W. Griffith (I have not seen these versions either). Unlike those, it had also been planned to be made into a Technicolor musical by Otto Preminger in 1945. That film was shelved however, making King's version the best-known made in Hollywood.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre, as part of the annual Noir City Xmas double-bill.

WHY: When Eddie Muller decided to use the announcement of the 2011 Noir City Film Festival as a fancy excuse to screen Remember The Night and Mr. Soft Touch in December 2010, I wonder if he realized he'd be creating a tradition that would stretch out for five Christmas seasons, providing excuses to show 35mm prints of ten holiday-related feature films to eager Castro audiences. Some of the selections have been more Xmassy (Remember the Night, last year's Christmas Eve) than noir, and others have been vice versa (Christmas Holiday in 2011 and Blast of Silence in 2013) but they've all been occasions to see mid-century motion pictures in a movie palace, and that's really all that matters. Tonight's screening pairs the O. Henry anthology with the wintry Curse of the Cat People, which I saw in a beautiful 35mm print at the Stanford last year. Between the two films there are seven different Hollywood directors, as Curse... was started by Gunther Von Fritsch in the director's chair, but finished by Robert Wise (his career-making promotion from the editor's booth) midway through production.

Even if you're not as excited as I am to see this double-bill, you may want to attend just to see a short documentary on the Noir City festival promised as part of the program, and to get the first eyeful of the full 2015 line-up. We already know that next year's festival is a week earlier than usual in recent years, running from January 16 to 25th, and that it will show the Film Noir Foundation's latest 35mm restorations, The Guilty and Woman on the Run (the latter a San Francisco-set Noir City rediscovery) at some point during the week and a half.  I'm dying to know if last year's "international" edition (which brought me to the Castro for every single film screened, for the first time in festival history) will have some world-class ripples into this year's program, and to find out if "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller is planning anything special for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which has for the past couple years been an occasion for a Castro screening of Wattstax, which seems likely to be a tradition no more with Noir City back in that weekend slot (as it had been when it was founded).

The Castro does have all its remaining December screenings planned out (including some more Christmas-themed programs: Muppet Christmas Carol, Die Hard and Scrooged this Sunday and It's A Wonderful Life Monday), as well as a number of its January ones as well. Those who love SF Sketchfest and Noir City equally will be glad to see that they overlap much less than in previous years, and that it's easy to filter all film events on the comedy festival's redesigned website.

Meanwhile, the Roxie, in addition to being a Sketchfest venue (screening a Preston Sturges film for, I think, the first time ever!) along with the Castro, is currently winding down the third iteration of its own international (specifically French) film noir series. I attended last night's screening of Witness In The City, an impressively atmospheric thriller based on a story written by the duo from where the ideas for Diabolique and Vertigo originally sprang (it repeats tonight) and I'll Spit On Your Graves, an imagining of American racial dynamics in the late 1950s that seems positively inept (unless I have a far worse understanding of history than I think I do) and that while watching made me feel far more forgiving of Hollywood attempts to depict foreign countries than usual. Maybe the hackers that have just encouraged James Franco to cancel his participation in this weekend's all-Coppola celebration, and made last month's Castro screening of The Interview seem a like an absolute must-see in hindsight should take a look at this one too. (It repeats at the Roxie tomorrow.)

HOW: O. Henry's Full House and The Curse of the Cat People both screen in 35mm prints.