INFERNO

My first great moviegoing experience of the year came courtesy of Noir City, from your friends at the Film Noir Foundation. The screening of a new DCP of a respected but little seen 3-D noir was always going to be an intriguing event; this particular presentation, the result not of corporate repackaging but some insane curatorial diligence (including a lucky find at an estate sale by the late 3-D producer Ray Zone), was nothing short of a goddamn miracle. Eddie Muller and co. have presented the fruit of their efforts back to 20th Century Fox (who had no idea this work was even being done on the film), and I'm hoping that digital rep offerings will include other left-field projects like this (or the lovely fan-made DCP of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE that made the rounds last year). The screening offered real excitement that at least this moviegoer usually doesn't feel in the face of digital cinema. And as a nice little bonus, the movie was pretty damn terrific, too.

INFERNO is a gritty and involving piece of work, with Robert Ryan battling for survival in the Mojave Desert (even as he contemplates how he'll dispatch the cheating wife and lover who marooned him there, if he survives). Director Roy Ward Baker, a perversely prolific journeyman whose filmography includes as diverse offerings as A NIGHT TO REMEMBER and THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, patiently creates a tense and involving film blanc, trading up noir's customary shadows for an ever-beating sun. The roughness of the digital transfer was evident in many of the more brightly lit scenes, but even the crystalline points of pixelation added a nice, somewhat psychedelic edge to the proceedings, endowing the screening with some of the character that an occasional scratch lends to a 35mm print. And though the film came out of Hollywood's initial 3-D craze, Baker's handling of 3-D is more subtle, putting the audience among the story's environments rather than constantly throwing things in our faces. Even if Baker does fling a snake or a rock at the camera from time to time, the effect is more startling given the involvement he's already made us feel. And the cast just brings it home: Robert Ryan is compelling as a man who just won't quit (unless he does), and Rhonda Fleming and William Lundigan are just as strong as the lovers dealing with the consequences of their plan.

(Image from They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To, who's just as high on the movie as I am.)

THE ANIMATRIX: A DETECTIVE STORY

(What you are about to read is a contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon, the details of which can be found at post's end. I have made a donation to the Film Noir Foundation, and hope you will do the same - link's at the end.)



When the brothers Wachowski commissioned some of Japan's finest animators to add short films to their ever-expanding Matrix franchise, director Shinichiro Watanabe was an ideal collaborator. Watanabe's landmark anime series Cowboy Bebop quickly found a devout cult audience for its story of planet-hopping bounty hunters, leavening its stylized anime action with a strident musical score and a generous dose of film noir style and fatalism. Watanabe's noir influences move front and center for his tight, nine-minute Matrix prequel, A Detective Story...


A Detective Story's protagonist is Ash, a put-upon private eye to whom we are introduced near the end of "the case to end all cases..."


But first things first: we go to the beginning of the case as Ash fields a client's call in a P.I.'s office straight out of Noir City:



Though fearing another domestic case, Ash finds that his generous client wants him to track down a mysterious computer hacker known as Trinity. Familiar as we are with Matrix lore, we know immediately that Ash is being set up as a pawn to pursue an agent of freedom by a conspiracy larger than he could possibly imagine. But like so many noir heroes before him, Ash takes the money and goes to work, unaware of the bad, bad hand fate has dealt him.

Ash's tools of the trade are both classic...


...and downright avant-garde, including a weirdly high-tech rig with multiple flatscreens and phone tech from some alternate universe's 1930s...


Ash soon finds out that other investigators seeking Trinity have wound up either dead or, in the case of one poor bastard, insane. A visit to the latter man's home does yield a disturbing, if visually striking, clue:


Several online, Lewis Carroll-coded communications later, Ash finds himself on a train to nowhere and, finally, face to face with Trinity:


Ash quickly realizes that there's much, much more to Trinity than he could have imagined. Just as, in The Matrix, Keanu Reeves' Neo was awakened to the world underneath his perceived reality, Ash finds the world he knew slipping from his grasp, and having made the trip through the looking glass finds himself in the grip of a reality that is simply beyond his comprehension. Ash is forced to make a crucial decision when several of their fellow passengers turn into Agents that move to eliminate them both.



As the agents draw nearer, Ash feels himself being physically transformed into one of them. Trinity must defend herself, and thus executes the function of femmes fatale from across the years.


Like other noir heroes before him, Ash seems to find a kind of comfort in the shadow of death's oncoming embrace, though he remains bewildered by his too-short life beyond the looking glass.


And Watanabe again engages our familiarity with the Matrix's overall story to give Ash what many noir creators refused their heroes, a simple moment of grace as Trinity confides in him her highest compliment: "For what it's worth, I think you could have handled the truth."


And so Trinity leaves, and even as the agents encroach on Ash, Watanabe's streak of generosity leaves him a final burst of energy to buy Trinity some time, to look death in the eye, and to enjoy one last cigarette.



Lights out.

Watanabe's most distinctive gift is his talent for combining disparate genres and cultures into bizarre but effective hybrids. That he would reach across decades to bring the high-tech, colorful, and action packed world of The Matrix into the lower tech, black-and-white, and somber world of film noir in A Detective Story only seems perverse in retrospect. In fully embracing the noir aesthetic Watanabe has crafted a lovely Matrix miniature, both a fine self-contained prelude to that sprawling (some would argue over-extended) franchise and a dark little gem in its own right. Pleasingly mind-bending, and simply noir as hell.


For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon is hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren. You can go here to read more about the Film Noir Foundation, here to read a cogent interview with FNF head Eddie Muller about its preservation projects and why they matter, and you can go here to make a donation.)

NOIR CITY rundown

The wrap-up of the annual Noir City festival leaves this writer with mixed emotions. The festival's customary gaudy, self-aggrandizing showmanship continued unabated, which may be an inducement to a number of the festival's loyal, diehard fans, but has always left me cold. I have no interest in winning prizes, in the stale jokes surrounding this (or any) year's Miss Noir City, or in the tired, TIRED wisecracks of the hosts. As dire as a more po-faced presentation would be, I can't help but feel that the irreverence with which Eddie Muller and co. continue to approach the films they purport to love so much only diminishes them, and stokes the unfortunate tendency of the Castro Theatre audience to regard the films in a campier light than necessary (though it seems I'm not alone in feeling so - one patron, during a screening of SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR... made my day by yelling in response to the titters that were steadily streaming through the audience, as did the woman who meekly offered: "I concur.")

That said, my consternation with the Film Noir Foundation's self-congratulation (and the same they cultivate in their audience) doesn't blind me to the nobility of their mission, or the quality of the films they present. There is a thrill that comes with these particular films unrolling during the usually cold month of January (among other things, it's nice to see Anita Monga, ousted years ago from her position as the Castro's programmer, bringing her curatorial intelligence back to its screen). The festival's balancing of classic noir (such as Otto Preminger's ANGEL FACE) with recently restored classics (like festival-closer THE HUNTED, starring actor/ice skater Belita) is as knowing and strong as ever, and the chance to catch up with favorite films and take in new films to the canon is, indeed, precious.

What I saw, briefly:

GASLIGHT - less a noir film than a murky period drama, the film of Patrick Hamilton's play benefits from solid characterizations, including one of my favorite performances from Joseph Cotten, believably smitten and, unlike Holly Martins, able to do right by the film's embattled heroine. I'm probably alone in wanting to see James Wan remake it.

STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT - cheap but credible Republic Gothic, with a returning WWII soldier tracking down his lady pen pal only to become enmeshed in the increasingly insane schemes of her mother (a gloriously unhinged Helen Thimig). Beautifully paced and packed into 56 suspenseful minutes by director Anthony Mann, but where similar stories would end with a house on fire, the danger of this one culminates with a painting falling on somebody. Beautiful.

THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS - For reasons I don't understand, Muller apologized for this one in advance. But Humphrey Bogart is completely believable as a conflicted, artist-blocked painter, as is Barbara Stanwyck as his increasingly concerned and endangered spouse. The reveal of the portrait is a truly unsettling show-stopper - I wonder what became of the actual painting.



MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS - made the name of director Joseph H. Lewis, and it's easy to see why. If it's too similar to GASLIGHT (the setting of the "madness" theme for the festival resulted in a few cases of deja vu), its inversion of the amnesia storyline makes for some powerful suspense.

SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR... - sorry to hear of the backstage conflicts between Fritz Lang and his creative team. If it's less visually ambitious than even the weirdest of his Hollywood films, it remains an assured and creepy take on the Bluebeard myth, with a lovely, dreamy Joan Bennett confronting the inner demons of perfect stranger Michael Redgrave. This one ends in flames. Muller and crew's insistence that the film is "incomprehensible" demeans it and them - the psychological throughline is completely credible, and its mirror to actual events in architectural history is fascinating (and I hope D., my fellow fancier of fetish and film, will sound off on these elements in the comments).

BLIND ALLEY - a very intriguing early Hollywood foray into the Freudian realm, with hostage psychologist Ralph Bellamy probing the psyche of desperate gangster Chester Morris.

ANGEL FACE - attractive but innocent fall guy: Robert Mitchum. Alluring but deadly femme fatale: Jean Simmons. Obsessed and overbearing filmmaker: Otto Preminger. Feeling that Mitchum is just utterly, completely fucked: Check. In some ways a by-the-numbers noir, but each of the tropes is so beautifully, even realistically realized that it just carries you down its spiral. The unhappy ending so often promised by Muller finally, gloriously manifests here.

THE HUNTED - there's something charming about how, in Monogram's grab for respectability after its rebirth as Allied Artists, the studio put so much faith in ice skater Belita as an A-lister. She's paired here with Preston Foster as the tough but smitten cop who sent her to prison. Though I couldn't really buy Foster in this role (he's fine as a cop, but too old and too grizzled to carry a torch for anyone for quite that long), there's something about Belita's not-quite-A-list looks, something real about her charms that carried me along. And the obligatory ice-skating sequence is just charming.

On balance, I'm pleased that Noir City continues, and I'm glad I got to see a third of the festival's total offerings. And yet for the first time we saw signs that the future is catching up to the venerable fest. The night he introduced THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS Muller mused that in addition to being the first time many of the audience had seen the film theatrically, it will more than likely be their last. Whatever my issues with Mr. Muller, I happily acknowledge that he's closer to aspect of the film exhibition game than I, and to hear such an enthusiastic proponent of film preservation and exhibition so tentative about the future of the festival in particular and exhibition in general does give one pause.

But hey, as long as the Film Noir Foundation continues to fight the good fight in keeping these films in the public eye and up on screen, I'll happily go see them.