Roxie noir series turns up the heat
The recent heat wave to blanket the Bay Area ain’t got nothin’ on the second edition of the international noir festival at the Roxie Theater.
Sweltering heat drenches this 12-film, four-day series, which goes by the name A Rare Noir Is Good to Find 2 — if not in outright temperature, then certainly in passion. Beginning Friday, May 5, with the landmark 1958 Egyptian film “Cairo Station” and concluding Monday, May 8, with the 1960 South Korean potboiler “The Housemaid,” crime takes a backseat to desire, with bodies glistening in sweat, mud, water or just plain lust.
As the dangerously alluring dance hall girl Leticia Palma puts it when speaking to a suitor in “The Road to Hell,” a 1951 Mexican noir that follows “Cairo Station” on opening night: “If you want me, you have to take on the world.”
Perhaps no film better realizes the potential of the fourday weekend than “Bitter Rice” (7 p.m. Sunday, May 7), Giuseppe De Santis’ 1949 Italian film that blends American noir aesthetics with Italian neorealism. It begins with a couple (Vittorio Gassman, Doris Dowling) on the lam after a jewel heist, then becomes a full-blown feminist socialist manifesto concerned with workers’ rights when they hide out in the rural rice fields of northern Italy.
Gassman is dangerous but magnetic to Dowling and rice worker Silvana Mangano, but his self-absorption and greed prove corrupting. (“Like poison ivy, you engulf me,” says a sweaty Mangano). But it’s not a love triangle, it’s a … quadrangle? Add the soldier stationed near the rice fields, Raf Vallone, whose idealism (“Prison was invented by people who have never been in one; Jail isn’t the only solution”) charms both women.
This is a movie that just plain goes for it, much like the other undisputed classic in the series, Carol Reed’s “Odd Man Out” (7 p.m. Saturday, May 6), a 1947 British film with a powerhouse central performance from James Mason as an Irish Republican Army killer hiding out from the police.
I’d also add “Cairo Station” (7:30 p.m. Friday, May 5) to the list of greats in this lineup. Written, directed by and starring Youssef Chahine, perhaps Egypt’s most important filmmaker, the film anticipates “Taxi Driver” — or at least Michael Powell’s 1960 thriller “Peeping Tom.” Set in the title train station on what appears to be a series of 100-degree days, Chahine is a crippled, sexually frustrated newspaper seller in love with a voluptuous woman (Hind Rostom) who hawks soft drinks to train passengers.
The level of sexual tension and general creepiness as Chahine’s character becomes unhinged is more intense than one would expect from a movie made in the 1950s under a totalitarian regime.
There are many other unexpected gems: Try the absolutely craziest movie of the series, the 1948 Czech film “Krakatit” (3:45 p.m. Sunday, May 7) in which a scientist who invents an incredibly destructive weapon feels guilty for his part in the impending doom he thinks is sure to come and gradually goes insane. Or does he? An alternate reading of director Otakar Vavra’s Kafkaesque descent into surrealism would be that the scientist is sane and all around him are crazy. Or something like that.
The series ends in Asia, with two can’t-miss philosophical examinations of darkness. Hideo Gosha’s “Cash Calls Hell” (7:15 p.m. Monday, May 8) is a thriller typical of Japanese crime films of the 1960s, but with a twist: A hit man (Tatsuya Nakadai) accepts a contract to kill three people, but then decides to save them instead, unraveling the mystery behind his employer as he goes.
“The Housemaid” (9 p.m.) isn’t really a noir, but that’s OK. Taking place almost entirely in a repressive household, Korean master Kim Kiyoung’s film has the title character (Lee Eun-shim) upending the lives of a married couple and their two children. Young, super-attractive and with more than one screw loose, the housemaid seduces the husband (Kim Jin-kyu) and threatens the wife with seemingly no other reason than to cause the maximum amount of mayhem and destruction.
The expertly increasing tension is enough to make a viewer sweat, and that’s the idea.
Friday-Monday, May 5-8. Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., S.F. (415) 863-1087. www. roxie.com