is the title of a week's worth of film noir double features about to play the SIFF Cinema at McCaw Hall (July 6-12). The phrase comes from a 1948 noir called "Hollow Triumph." It just goes to show. There's a distinct air of hollow triumph about the event, and it's a bitter little world indeed in which the Seattle International Film Festival can run so blithely roughshod over local film culture.
No complaints about the programming, which we'll get to in a moment. But the package - a franchise deal spun off Eddie Muller's Noir City operation in San Francisco - comes billed as "The First Annual Seattle Film Noir Festival." Anyone who's been paying attention will know that that's a crock.
Seattle has had an annual film noir "festival" for several decades and counting: Greg Olson's showcase of noir gems (and the occasional zircon) every autumn at the Seattle Art Museum. Indeed, Olson has shown virtually (literally?) every film about to be screened at McCaw Hall. And just as he's gearing up to program and publicize his fall 2007 slate, here comes the SIFF steamroller.
Why should such a thing be happening? Is the SIFF team heartless, or just clueless - and either way, where does that leave us?
For the moment, it leaves us with an astute cross-section of Hollywood's most memorably transgressive genre - a dark spectrum ranging from an ultrapersonal masterpiece by one of cinema's greatest artists to a clutch of gritty program pictures giving off the sour perfume of defeat and (self-) deception.
The series steps off Friday, July 6, with Jules Dassin's "Thieves' Highway" (1948) and Harold Clurman's "Deadline at Dawn" (1946). The Dassin picture may be the director's best, a powerful A.E. Bezzerides tale of racketeering and the trucking industry; "Deadline" was theater director Clurman's only filmmaking effort, with a script by Clifford Odets from a story by the ineffably creepy Cornell Woolrich.
If you see only one film in the SIFF lineup, make it "Pitfall," Saturday, July 7. This terrific Andre de Toth picture (1948) cuts deeper into bourgeois normalcy than almost any other noir specimen - its last line, and last line-delivery, is devastating - but it remains little-known and unavailable on DVD; Dick Powell, Jane Wyatt, Raymond Burr and the husky-voiced platinum blonde Lizabeth Scott star. Cofeature is another obscure offering, the 1950 "Woman on the Run," directed by sometime Hitchcock associate Norman Lloyd.
Noir means black, of course, but the Sunday, July 8, bill offers the rare spectacle of '40s noir in Technicolor: "Leave Her to Heaven" (1945) and "Desert Fury" (1948). The latter is disappointing despite direction by Lewis Allen, script by A.E. Bezzerides and Robert Rossen, and a strong cast (Burt Lancaster, Lizabeth Scott again, John Hodiak, Mary Astor, Wendell Corey). But "Heaven," directed by John M. Stahl, is "one of the most unblinkingly perverse movies ever offered up as a prestige picture by a major studio in the golden age of Hollywood" (forgive me for quoting myself). Gene Tierney stars, as a monster.
"99 River Street" (1953) is a transcendent example of the sort of excellence B-movie filmmaking was capable of; John Payne, a dull leading man in '40s musical comedies, came into his own playing battered losers in the mid-'50s, and Phil Karlson was the right director for him. The movie shows Monday, July 9, with the so-so Glenn Ford vehicle "Framed" (1947).
Tuesday, July 10, brings "I Love Trouble" (1948), a rara avis I haven't seen, with Franchot Tone and a lot of tasty character actors, and "Pushover" (1954), with Fred MacMurray as corrupt-cop fall guy to Kim Novak.
The main distinction of "The Spiritualist" (a.k.a. "The Amazing Mr. X," 1948) is tour-de-force cinematography by John Alton, but "Nightmare Alley" (1947) is a classic in anybody's book: Tyrone Power begged the studio to let him play the seedy/silky con-artist antihero, and it was a personal triumph. Another great cinematographer at work here: Lee Garmes. That's Wednesday, July 11.
The series wraps July 12 with that masterpiece I mentioned, Fritz Lang's "Scarlet Street" (1945), with Edward G. Robinson at his peak and Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea. "Wicked Woman" (1953), by "D.O.A." writers Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, features Beverly Michaels, Richard Egan and that squealing noir piggie Percy Helton.
Admission to each double bill is $10 general, $9 SIFF members.
- RTJ
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