Good reasons to attend Film Noir
Feast on these hard-boiled offerings
Courtyard Wingding
The annual summer film festival kicks off Aug. 3 in style, with DJs spinning jazz records before the evening’s two feature films — Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, based on a James M. Cain novel and starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, and Night Editor. The latter, from the B-movie vaults, boasts “one of the iciest, most treacherous, morally unhinged femme fatales in all of film noir” (noiroftheweek.com).
Triple bills
Can’t get enough of the dark, nihilistic genre? Cinematheque is offering triple bills at $22 on Aug. 5, 6, 7 and 19.
Classics
Besides Double Indemnity, genre high points include The Maltese Falcon, Gun Crazy, Dark Passage and Kiss Me Deadly.
Obscurities
For the true noir buff, though, Cinematheque’s film noir series offers a chance to see rarely-shown films, some in 35mm prints, on the big screen. This year’s gems include couple-on-the-lam thriller Shockproof, the Dashiell Hammett-novel-based The Glass Key with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, and the Expressionist film Phantom Lady. Of the latter, the cinematheque.ca description notes that the 1944 movie has “a steamy, sexually-charged jazz sequence involving (Ella) Raines and, on drums, Elisha Cook Jr. ”that ”still amazes.”
Noir Sidebar
As part of the series, Cinematheque is presenting two hard-boiled science fiction films from the fifties: the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Them! — Shawn Conner