Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman in BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD
I’ve been recommending the Noir City film fest, underway in San Francisco and running through Sunday. Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller. The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and movies not available on DVD. And we get to watch them in vintage movie palace (San Francisco’s Castro Theatre) with a thousand other film fans.
To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here. Here are the highlights of Noir City’s bang up final weekend:
Charley Varrick: the shamefully underrated American neo-noir from the 1970s with Walter Mathau. To survive, he’s got to outsmart the mob all by himself.
The Aura: A completely overlooked 2005 neo-noir from Argentina about an epileptic taxidermist. He’s smart enough to plan the Perfect Crime, but does he have the sociopathic ruthlessness?
Before the Devil Know You’re Dead: A masterpiece from the then 84-year-old director Sidney Lumet, it features one of the best performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Then there’s Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei and Michael Shannon – but Albert Finney steals the movie at the end.
Victoria: A 2015 European thrill ride filmed in a single 138-minute shot.
I always look forward to the Noir City film fest, which gets underway in San Francisco this week. Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller. The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and movies not available on DVD. And we get to watch them in a vintage movie palace (San Francisco’s Castro Theatre) with a thousand other film fans.
The theme of this year’s festival is the Heist Movie, Noir City is presenting a wonderful array of heist movies from the classic American film noir period, foreign noirs and an especially healthy selection of neo-noirs. Being noir, you might not expect many of these heists to end well. And some are from noir’s Perfect Crime sub-genre – they’re going to get away with the elaborately planned big heist EXCEPT FOR ONE THING.
Noir City runs January 20-29. To see the this year’s Noir City program and buy tickets, go here.
On Noir City’s first weekend:
The Asphalt Jungle: As long as things go according to plan… John Huston directed a marvelous cast (Sterling Hayden, James Whitmore, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, John McIntire). And even Louis Calhern knows that Marilyn Monroe isn’t going to stick around as his moll.
Violent Saturday: a completely overlooked film from one of my favorite directors that I hadn’t seen until Eddie Muller programmed it for this festival. Filmed in the bright Arizona desert with CinemaScope and De Luxe color, the story is plenty noir.
Four Ways Out: Saturday night, Noir City goes goes Italian with the last script written by screenwriter Federico Fellini before he started directing. Four guys pull a heist, and it goes bad four different ways.
Big Deal on Madonna Street, the funniest film in the festival, with an Italian gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Watch for a 34-year-old pre-Fellini Marcello Mastroianni.
Rififi: This French classic is the top heist film ever and pioneering in its use of real time. After the team is assembled and the job is plotted, the actual crime unfolds in real-time – over thirty minutes of nerve wracking silence.
The Big Risk: It’s a highlight because it’s a French noir starring the bloodhound-visaged Lino Ventura that I have NOT seen, so I’ll be going to Noir City myself on Sunday.
And midweek, at Noir City:
The rarely-seen Once a Thief (Alain Delon, trying to keep Ann-Margret while being hunted by Van Heflin) and The Sicilian Clan (with the neo-noir trifecta of Delon, Ventura and Jean Gabin), both on Wednesday evening, January 25.
I’ll be writing about Noir City’s tremendous final weekend. Stay tuned.
The 1969 French neo-noir The Sicilian Clan is an exemplar of noir’s Perfect Crime sub-genre – they’re going to get away with the elaborately planned big heist EXCEPT FOR ONE THING. In this case, the one thing is Sicilian macho pride.
There’s an inventive jail break, an exciting boudoir escape and an impossibly brilliant heist plan. There’s also a great scene with a kid and his toy gun. The suspense tightens even more when a minor character’s wife unexpectedly shows up and threatens to derail the heist again and again.
Most of all, director Henri Verneuil knew that he had three unbeatable cards to play, and he got the most from them:
Alain Delon – Impossibly handsome and dashing, no one ever removed their sunglasses with more of a flourish than Delon. Delon was in his early thirties, and at the peak of his string of crime movie vehicles, after Anybody Can Win and Le Samourai and before Le Cercle Rouge and The Gypsy.
Lino Ventura – One of the most watchable French stars, Ventura’s bloodhound face had been reshaped by his earlier career as a professional wrestler. Here, he’s the guy you’re drawn to whenever he’s on-screen.
Jean Gabin – Probably the greatest male French movie star ever, Gabin had dominated prewar French cinema with Pepe LeMoko, La Grande Illusion, Port of Shadows and Le Bete Humaine. After the war, he aged into noir (Touchez Pas aux Grisbi) and, in the 1960s, into neo-noir. Gabin oozed a seasoned cool (like Bogart) and imparted a stately gravitas to his noir and neo-noir characters.
In The Sicilian Clan, Delon plays the reckless hood in over his head. Gabin plays the crime boss who is exploiting him. And Ventura plays the cagey detective after them both.
Here’s a nice touch – the highly professional gang brings in an outsider who is a hopeless drunk. What is his specialty and why do they need him? When we find out during the final heist, it’s a stunner that no one could see coming.
The whistling and boings in the offbeat score tell us that it’s the work of Ennio Morricone in his Spaghetti Western period; I’m a Morricone fan, but this is not one of his best.
The Sicilian Clan is not a classic. The dialogue is grossly clichéd. There is not a single ordinary looking woman in the film. An obligatory tryst is tiresomely predictable and made worse by the score’s wacky, clanging music.
But the plot, while contrived, is well-contrived. And the combination of Delon, Ventura and Gabin will make almost anything work. You can watch The Sicilian Clan at the Castro Theatre during Noir City 2017, or stream it from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
[Note: In our post 9/11 world, audiences will feel uneasy when a hijacked airplane flies low over the Manhattan skyscrapers.]
Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots in FRANK & LOLA. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
The absorbing neo-noir romance Frank & Lola opens with a couple lovemaking for the first time – and right away there’s a glimmer that he’s more invested than she is. Soon we’re spirited from Vegas to Paris and back again in a deadly web of jealousy.
Lola (Imogen Poots) is young and beautiful, a lively and sparkly kind of girl. Frank (the great Michael Shannon) is older but “cool” – a talented chef. He is loyal and steadfast but given to possessiveness, and he says things like, “who’s the mook?”.
In a superb debut feature, writer director Matthew Ross has invented a Lola that we (and Frank) spend the entire movie trying to figure out. Imogen Poots is brilliant in her most complex role so far. She’s an unreliable girlfriend – but the roots of her unreliability are a mystery – is she Bad or Troubled? A character describes her with “She can be very convincing”, and that’s NOT a complement. Poots keeps us on edge throughout the film, right up to her stunning final monologue.
Shannon, of course, is superb, and the entire cast is exceptional. There’s a memorable turn by Emmanuelle Devos, the off-beat French beauty with the cruel mouth. Rosanna Arquette is wonderful, as is Michael Nyqvist from the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies. I especially liked Justin Long as Keith Winkleman (is he a namedropping ass or something more?).
Frank & Lola has more than its share of food porn and, as befits a neo-noir, lots of depravity. But, at its heart, it’s a romance. Is Lola a Bad Girl or a Troubled Girl? If she’s bad, then love ain’t gonna prevail. But if she’s damaged, can love survive THAT either? We’re lucky enough to go along for the ride.
I saw Frank & Lola in May at the San Francisco International Film Festival. I liked it more than most and put it on my Best Movies of 2016. After a brief and tiny theatrical release in December which did not reach the Bay Area, Frank & Lola is now available to stream on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Kate Lyn Shein and Kentucker Audley in SUN DON'T SHINE
Thirtyish Crystal and Leo are on the run and coaxing his weathered (and probably uninsured) sedan through central Florida. Crystal is a white-hot mess. I was going to describe her as needy and erratic, but those adjectives seem inadequate. She is a unfiltered, explosive bundle of nerves, filled with impulses that are unfailingly ruinous. The suspense in Sun Don’t Shine stems from whether Leo can navigate an escape path through her emotional minefield; we can tell from the neo-noir undercurrent that she’s going to bring him down no matter what.
In her first feature, writer-director Amy Seimetz combines a command of pacing with a Malickesque visual sense. Watching her sweaty characters, we can feel both the Floridian humidity and the relief from air conditioning in a tourist trap. (A promising actor, Seimetz just turned in a compelling performance in the controversial Upstream Color.)
The strength of the screenplay is that the audience only gradually learns why the two are on the run, from what and to where. However, those revelations are not surprising. Fortunately, Seimetz has chosen not to send her characters on yet another hyper-violent nihilistic crime spree.
But why doesn’t Leo leave Crystal on the side of the road and drive the hell away? After about fifteen minutes, we know that’s his only chance. He’s not very bright, but he is grounded in reality, and we wonder why he is so drawn to this wackadoodle. It may be a fim noir, but she sure isn’t Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy in Maltese Falcon.
Watching Sun Don’t Shine is a 96-minute simulation of having an annoyingly clingy and scarily volatile girlfriend. Long ago my friend Steve advised me, “Never sleep with anyone crazier than you are”. Sage words, my friend.
Sun Don’t Shine is available for streaming from Amazon Instant and other VOD outlets, and is beginning a limited theatrical release.
