You can take the Seattle Art Museum Film Series out of the Seattle Art Museum (to the Museum of History and Industry, till spring 2007), but you can't take film noir out of the series. Not if it's fall, and not if Greg Olson is bent on making a 29th year of it as curator of the nation's oldest annual celebration of noir, that cinematic belladonna that first bloomed in mid-1940s Hollywood and memorably festered well into the next decade. Olson is, of course, thus bent, and several hundred obsessive Northwest noiristes rely upon it.
By this point Olson's ongoing inventory of "The Film Noir Cycle" has long since paid tribute to the cardinal noir titles (such as, last year, "Scarlet Street," "The Blue Dahlia" and "Cry of the City"). Now the series' agenda tends more toward mining unheralded gems and pushing the envelope: pushing the envelope in terms of both enlarging ticket-buyers' awareness of the myriad movies comprising this genre-that-never-was-a-genre, and teasing out what can and cannot be defined as noir. In addition, each year's lineup now includes a title or two that postdate noir's classic, historical period (Orson Welles' 1958 "Touch of Evil" being generally regarded as the last word) and raise the question whether the crime films and thrillers of the '60s, '70s and beyond can be said to extend noir's heritage or profane it. (Semantic conundrum: Can the profane be profaned? Discuss amongst yourselves.)
One other feature that distinguishes Olson's noir programming is that, whenever feasible, the curator seeks out 35mm prints, often from archives or private collectors. The increasing availability of vintage films on DVD is a boon to cinephiles and casual viewers alike; and as it happened, Olson's 2004 borrowing of the Library of Congress restoration of Fritz Lang's "Scarlet Street" - long available only in smudgy public-domain prints and videos - was followed within the year by Kino's release of crisp DVDs mastered from that same restoration. But we're still waiting for a decent digital specimen of, say, the 1948 "Hollow Triumph," which Olson showcased last year via a brilliant print from UCLA Film Archive. There's no topping the depth and voluptuousness of a movie on film. In the case of "Hollow Triumph," to see the film without full access to cinematographer John Alton's brilliant chiaroscuro lighting is scarcely to see it at all.
"Night Beat: The Film Noir Cycle" runs 7:30 p.m. Thursdays (except Thanks-giving) through Dec. 7. Series tickets, available by phoning 654-3121, are $58 for SAM, MOHAI and Seattle International Film Festival members, $65 for others. Individual tickets may be available at 7 p.m. on any given night, at the door. MOHAI, at 2700 24th Ave. E., has plenty of free parking. (Note: "The Killers," Robert Siodmak's 1946 classic, had its showing last weekend.)
"Night Editor" (Oct. 5) could turn out to be one of the undiscovered gems. A 66-minute B movie that Columbia apparently intended to kick off another of its program-picture series (à la "The Whistler"), the film focuses on a police detective (William Gargan) who witnesses a murder but can't report it because he was embroiled in an adulterous tryst at the time. Janice Carter and Jeff Donnell costar. Henry Levin directed.
No guessing about "The Breaking Point" (Oct. 12), the last really good movie of director Michael Curtiz's prolific career (1950) and, wouldn'cha know, another Hemingway adaptation: a closer adaptation of his novel "To Have and Have Not" than "To Have and Have Not" was. John Garfield stars as a charter fishing-boat captain whose clients involve him in murky doings. Phyllis Thaxter plays his wife; Patricia Neal, a platinum-blond distraction of the highest order. The great Juano Hernandez takes the "Eddie" role (here, Wesley), and the first-class black-and-white camerawork is by Ted McCord ("The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"). Film noir maven Eddie Muller will be on hand to testify as to why this is one of the great, neglected films noirs.
"The Mob" (Oct. 19) is another Columbia picture, starring their recent Oscar-winner Broderick Crawford ("All the King's Men") as an undercover cop investigating the scene of the studio's future Oscar-winner "On the Waterfront." Robert Parrish directed a cast including such eminent uglies as Ernest Borgnine, Neville Brand, John Marley, Frank De Kova and Jay Adler.
John Garfield returns in his final role, as a cop-killer who goes underground in an urban family's sweltering apartment in 1951's "He Ran All the Way" (Oct. 26). This quasi-independent production features the creative efforts of director John Berry and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo - like Garfield, victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist. Excellent supporting cast - Shelley Winters, Wallace Ford, Selena Royle, Norman Lloyd - and a humid New York City atmosphere you can feel on your skin thanks to ace cameraman James Wong Howe.
Marilyn Monroe, who went over Niagara in the previous SAM noir series, is all-too-persuasive as a hotel babysitter with a lethal screw loose in "Don't Bother to Knock" (Nov. 2). British-born director Roy (Ward) Baker would make one more taut American thriller, "Inferno" (1953), before returning home to make such films as "A Night to Remember" (a Titanic movie) and the estimable "Five Million Years to Earth" and "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde." With Richard Widmark, Anne Bancroft (first screen role) and Elisha Cook Jr.
The august King Vidor directed "Ruby Gentry" (Nov. 9), a sultry exercise in what we might term Southern noir - swamp noir? - starring Jennifer Jones and the pre-Moses Charlton Heston. Jones takes her place in a noble line of assertive Vidor leading ladies undone by the class system, social prejudice and, to be sure, raging hormones. Karl Malden plays a licentious rich guy, and James Anderson, the very bad man of "To Kill a Mockingbird" nine years hence, is Jones' religious-fanatic brother. The screenplay is credited to erstwhile Fritz Lang squeeze and collaborator Silvia Richards. And yes, you get to hear the song "Ruby."
"Black Tuesday" (Nov. 16) stars Edward G. Robinson as a convict attempting a prison break from the end of the last mile on death row. The 1954 film was written by Sydney ("The Big Heat") Boehm and directed by the Argentine-born Hugo Fregonese. With Peter Graves, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly and the late Jean Parker.
The dark jewel of this noir season is "The Big Combo" (Nov. 30), a top-drawer 1955 specimen that's been hard to see in a pristine version. That's a crime, because John Alton, the doyen of noir lighting cameramen, never shot a fiercer movie; the final scene is noir as hard-core as it gets. The husband-and-wife team of Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace play, respectively, a police detective and the mistress of the underworld kingpin he's obsessed with nailing. A major factor in the obsession is the cop's hopeless love for the woman. Richard Conte is malignancy personified as the icy Mr. Brown ("First is first and second is nobody"), Brian Donlevy has the creepiest role of his career as the mobster's hearing-impaired right-hand man, and Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman are memorable as a team of gay hitmen. Joseph H. Lewis ("Gun Crazy") directed; Philip Yordan ("Johnny Guitar") scripted.
I remain unpersuaded that "Bullitt" (Dec. 7) has a legitimate claim to a limb on the noir family tree, but Peter Yates' movie about a hard-driving, authority-flouting police detective (Steve McQueen) was undeniably a critical and popular smash in 1968, and the hilly streets of San Francisco have never had another such workout. You be the judge. Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bisset and Robert Duvall costar.[[In-content Ad]]
