Noir City Notebook 1
Jul. 16th, 2007 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77I'm pleased to say that I ended up seeing even more of the Noir City festival than I'd initially planned, last week: ten films noir from the '40s and '50s, some of them exceedingly rare, as well as Robert Altman's 1973 The Long Goodbye. I'd meant to post notes as I went, but better late than never, right? These were my impressions of the first three pictures I saw during the festival:
Thieves' Highway (1949): Who knew that the produce business could be so cutthroat?--Literally? (I mean, you'd probably assume that about meat-packing and slaughterhouses, even if you'd never heard of The Jungle, right ...?) If long-haul trucker Nick Garcos doesn't end up in a ditch beside the road, odds seem to be that he'll get robbed and mutilated in San Francisco. After all, look what happened to his old man ... Seriously, though, this movie made me extremely curious to see director Jules Dassin's more famous Night and the City.
Woman on the Run (1950): If I have one quibble with this movie, it's that it has the wrong damned title. At no point during this picture is Ann Sheridan's Eleanor Johnson "on the run"; her husband is, pretty much constantly. I guess that titles like Runaway Husband or Woman in Pursuit didn't work for studio execs or audiences in 1950.
More substantively, I thought that this movie provides an early example of how much the camera lens loves, loves, loves that City by the Bay. Urban neighborhoods sprawled over hilly terrain create a jumble of perspectives and shadows that readily evoke that film noir look and its associated themes of dislocation, anomie, secrecy, distrust, frayed social relationships, etc. (I'd argue that Woman on the Run does a better job of capturing this aspect of San Francisco's geography than even Hitchcock's Vertigo; the recent Zodiac achieves some similar effects--but more with fog and shadow than with terrain.) The plot is no less characteristic of postwar noir, focusing on a troubled marriage, an anonymous killer who is stalking a potential witness, police who are willing to put this potential witness' life at risk for the good of "the majority," and (centrally) a wife struggling to find her estranged husband before the killer does.
Despite the dark subject matter, though, the audience's experience of Woman on the Run is buoyed by a nearly-constant stream of Chandleresque banter, most of the choicest lines going to Ann Sheridan's plucky heroine.
Another significant fact: according to the festival's organizers, we were watching the only existing print of this picture. Long believed lost, this copy was apparently rescued from Universal's vaults not long ago. Alas, that probably means that you won't have the chance to see this one for awhile.
The Pitfall (1948): Bored insurance executive John Forbes (Dick Powell) looks around at his successful career, his ostensibly happy marriage, his well-appointed suburban home, and, yes, wonders if that's all there is. He asks his wife wryly if this is what they'd really set out to make of their lives, playfully suggesting that they should run off to South America. When wife Sue (Jane Wyatt of "Father Knows Best" ...) more or less shrugs at his discontent, Forbes does what bored movie husbands tend to do: he has an affair. Forbes' dalliance with model Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) is short-lived (Mona breaks it off when she realizes that he's married), but the damage is done. A sleazy detective and volatile ex-boyfriend are waiting in the wings, blackmail and violence ensue.
In fact, you could look at The Pitfall as a sort of rough draft of more recent movies about the bourgeois malaise, "Little boxes on the hillside/All made of ticky-tacky," and misbehaving suburban males--David Lynch, anyone? Blue Velvet for example tempts and frightens bland Kyle MacLachlan with a similar underworld of sex, crime, and abnormal psychology, only the threat represented by that world actually seems even more dire in David Lynch's version of things. On the other hand, Alan Ball's American Beauty treats the suffocating pretensions of bourgeois suburban life as more threatening than their supposed transgressions.
Personally, at this point I prefer Weeds, in which a suburban woman tastes some forbidden fruit, and discovers that this shit ain't half bad ...
More Later.
Thieves' Highway (1949): Who knew that the produce business could be so cutthroat?--Literally? (I mean, you'd probably assume that about meat-packing and slaughterhouses, even if you'd never heard of The Jungle, right ...?) If long-haul trucker Nick Garcos doesn't end up in a ditch beside the road, odds seem to be that he'll get robbed and mutilated in San Francisco. After all, look what happened to his old man ... Seriously, though, this movie made me extremely curious to see director Jules Dassin's more famous Night and the City.
Woman on the Run (1950): If I have one quibble with this movie, it's that it has the wrong damned title. At no point during this picture is Ann Sheridan's Eleanor Johnson "on the run"; her husband is, pretty much constantly. I guess that titles like Runaway Husband or Woman in Pursuit didn't work for studio execs or audiences in 1950.
More substantively, I thought that this movie provides an early example of how much the camera lens loves, loves, loves that City by the Bay. Urban neighborhoods sprawled over hilly terrain create a jumble of perspectives and shadows that readily evoke that film noir look and its associated themes of dislocation, anomie, secrecy, distrust, frayed social relationships, etc. (I'd argue that Woman on the Run does a better job of capturing this aspect of San Francisco's geography than even Hitchcock's Vertigo; the recent Zodiac achieves some similar effects--but more with fog and shadow than with terrain.) The plot is no less characteristic of postwar noir, focusing on a troubled marriage, an anonymous killer who is stalking a potential witness, police who are willing to put this potential witness' life at risk for the good of "the majority," and (centrally) a wife struggling to find her estranged husband before the killer does.
Despite the dark subject matter, though, the audience's experience of Woman on the Run is buoyed by a nearly-constant stream of Chandleresque banter, most of the choicest lines going to Ann Sheridan's plucky heroine.
Another significant fact: according to the festival's organizers, we were watching the only existing print of this picture. Long believed lost, this copy was apparently rescued from Universal's vaults not long ago. Alas, that probably means that you won't have the chance to see this one for awhile.
The Pitfall (1948): Bored insurance executive John Forbes (Dick Powell) looks around at his successful career, his ostensibly happy marriage, his well-appointed suburban home, and, yes, wonders if that's all there is. He asks his wife wryly if this is what they'd really set out to make of their lives, playfully suggesting that they should run off to South America. When wife Sue (Jane Wyatt of "Father Knows Best" ...) more or less shrugs at his discontent, Forbes does what bored movie husbands tend to do: he has an affair. Forbes' dalliance with model Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) is short-lived (Mona breaks it off when she realizes that he's married), but the damage is done. A sleazy detective and volatile ex-boyfriend are waiting in the wings, blackmail and violence ensue.
In fact, you could look at The Pitfall as a sort of rough draft of more recent movies about the bourgeois malaise, "Little boxes on the hillside/All made of ticky-tacky," and misbehaving suburban males--David Lynch, anyone? Blue Velvet for example tempts and frightens bland Kyle MacLachlan with a similar underworld of sex, crime, and abnormal psychology, only the threat represented by that world actually seems even more dire in David Lynch's version of things. On the other hand, Alan Ball's American Beauty treats the suffocating pretensions of bourgeois suburban life as more threatening than their supposed transgressions.
Personally, at this point I prefer Weeds, in which a suburban woman tastes some forbidden fruit, and discovers that this shit ain't half bad ...
More Later.
