Roxie offers a trip to the dark side
“Coming back to the Roxie is irresistible,” says Elliot Lavine, the longtime programmer of noir and other classic rarities, who returns to the Mission theater to present “The Dark Side of the Dream.” The program running Friday, March 23, through March 26 spans the pre-Code era of the 1930s through the last gasps of noir in the mid’60s.
“It’s a response to the current president’s administration,” Lavine says. “I think it’s safe to say that many of the films that are in the series are a direct reflection of the problems that are not necessarily being resolved by this administration, but are being exacerbated by it.”
What Lavine discovered as he was programming the series were eerie parallels between the past and present in terms of politics and social ills.
The most pointed double bill of the long weekend is the Sunday screening of “A Face in the Crowd,” Elia Kazan’s 1957 drama starring Andy Griffith as a radio and TV personality whose folksy charm hides ugly, naked ambition and cruelty. Playing with it is “Meet John Doe,” starring Gary Cooper as a tramp caught up in a newspaper publisher’s political power play.
“It details the effects of what happens when a fascistic organization gains control of the public consciousness,” says Lavine. “Even though it’s coming from Frank Capra, the master of ‘Capracorn,’ this is a really cynical, pessimistic film.”
The 1950s Hollywood blacklist looms large in the series. Double bills revolve around director Joseph Losey, who was exiled from the United States by it, and actor John Garfield, dead at 39 in 1952 — some thought
the stress of his refusal to name names and that he was about to change course caused the heart attack that killed him.
“Garfield could easily be the poster boy for the blacklist period,” Lavine says.
The Losey films on Saturday are his 1951 remake of Fritz Lang’s “M,” with David Wayne as a hunted child killer and “The Lawless” (1950), with eerie parallels today in its story of a small town in which immigrant Mexican fruit pickers are held in suspicion by the white middle class.
The Garfield films that close the series on March 26 are “Body and Soul” (1947), blacklisted director Robert Rossen’s classic noir (written by blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky) about a boxer (Garfield) involved with a shady promoter, and “We Were Strangers” (1949), a rarely screened John Huston drama set during the 1933 Cuban revolution that led to Batista’s rule.
“It’s a great, great radical, rebellious film,” says Lavine of the latter. “It’s a very exciting, politically charged film. It’s kind of remarkable that more people connected to it weren’t blacklisted.”
The series gets under way with “Try and Get Me!,” a 1950 crime drama inspired by the 1933 Brooke Hart kidnapping and murder in San Jose. In the film, Frank Lovejoy plays a man who joins a criminal’s (Lloyd Bridges) reckless scheme out of desperation.
“It deals with, literally, the wholesale demolition of the American dream, at least as it was perceived to be, something that we strive for, something you attain, and you’re happy, and you don’t bother anybody,” says Lavine. “The film deals with people who are on the outside of that dream.”
“Black Legion” (1937), starring Humphrey Bogart as a factory worker who lashes out when he loses a promotion to an immigrant, shares the bill with “Try and Get Me!”
Being passed over “opens up the floodgates to a lot of hatred and persecution, and ultimately the film becomes a condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan,” says Lavine. “In a 1930s melodrama coming out of a big studio, that was an extremely radical presentation of an idea.”
Working girls are the subject of the Saturday pairing of “Marked Woman” (1937), with Bette Davis as a “hostess” who testifies against her mobster boss, and “The Naked Kiss” (1964), Samuel Fuller’s melodrama starring Constance Towers as a prostitute who tries to start over again as a nurse.
“Both films really speak dramatically toward prostitution, both with respect to their exploitation by criminal elements, which is sad enough, but also in terms of public perception of people who choose to live their lives in a certain proscribed manner,” says Lavine.
And lest one thinks the opioid epidemic is something new, 1933’s “Heroes for Sale,” which plays at the Sunday matinee with the mob violence-tinged crime drama “They Won’t Forget” (1937), disabuses that notion. Richard Barthelmess plays a World War I veteran who returns from the front addicted to morphine.
“It’s the oldest film (in the program),” says Lavine. “It’s also one of the most modern films in the lineup. It just defies most people’s expectations of what an early ’30s movie can look like, feel like, sound like.
“I’d been looking for a context for venting,” he adds. “People can look at these films and be entertained by them, but they need to pay attention to what the films are actually talking about.”