Though she was not the most rapt of his admirers, Pauline Kael did sum up David Lynch’s unique place by calling him the screen’s “first populist surrealist”—the talent that came closest to bringing an experimental, subversive underground sensibility to mainstream filmgoers. Of course, he wasn’t all that popular. As big an imprint as he may have left on our culture, he only made ten features, the last five (everything after Wild at Heart) largely funded outside the US. Long before failing health hobbled him in recent years, he could no longer secure funding for more. So instead he busied himself with music videos, TV projects, shorts, web series, musical collaborations, writing, design, painting, and the odd acting job.
Some of that great miscellany is for completists only, though there are no lack of those. But at his best, Lynch seemed to tap into a highly personal yet collective subconscious, with images and ideas both beautiful and alarming in some primal way. His death at age 78 last week brought to an end a career that was hugely influential, yet never really comparable to anyone else’s. His vision was singular, even when it failed artistically (let alone commercially, as it usually did); very few among his major works fit comfortably into any standard genre.
If anything, the category he circled most closely around was lurid pulp fiction and its celluloid translation as film noir. Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive in their different ways were all fatalistic, vaguely retro potboilers toying with conventions of crime melodrama and mystery-suspense. They came complete with femmes fatale, glamorously sketchy nightclubs, doomed romantic liaisons—but also dreamscapes and id-monsters not to be found in noir’s original heyday, elements closer to horror, fantasy and abstract art.
Good timing, then, that the annual Noir City happens to be rolling around now as a sort of accidental memorial. The 22nd edition running this Fri/24 through Feb. 2 at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre offers up some among no doubt many vintage models that helped shape Lynch’s fantastical take on American life. As usual, the 12 programs on tap this year include some celebrated titles likely to be well-known already to fans.
They include all-time noir classics Out of the Past and Kiss of Death (both from 1947), Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 breakthrough The Killing, early Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder, My Sweet (1944), the first version of The Narrow Margin (1952), and notorious pioneering “women in prison” tale Caged (1950). There are highly regarded entries from some of noir’s greatest directors, such as Phil Karlson (99 River Street), Anthony Mann (Raw Deal), Fritz Lang (The Woman in the Window), Max Ophuls (The Reckless Moment), Robert Siodmak (Phantom Lady), Joseph Losey (The Prowler), Billy Wilder (Ace in the Hole), and Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour).
But also as usual, there are excavated features that still languish in relative obscurity, and should prove fresh discoveries for much of the festival’s loyal audience. This year’s dozen double-bills were assembled with a particular thematic emphasis on the ladies of noir, some of them (as the saying goes) “deadlier than the male.” In 1949’s Tension, Audrey Totter is the faithless platinum-blonde wife of pharmacist Richard Basehart. When she leaves him for some other guy, her husband assumes a new identity to exact his revenge. In a neat twist, however, this trashy spouse turns out to have less to fear from her spouse than from a police detective (Barry Sullivan) just as sleazy and conniving as she is.
Not every noir dame is a bona fide bad girl. Some are sympathetic—to a point—like Rhonda Fleming in 1951’s Cry Danger, a goldmine of snappy patter in which she’s ex-con Dick Powell’s ex. Her flame-red locks are done justice in Inferno, a Technicolor thriller in which she and lover William Lundigan leave her rich, nasty alcoholic husband Robert Ryan to die in the desert with a broken leg—underestimating his resiliency. Part of the original 3-D craze, that 1953 film will be shown in its original “stereoscopic” format.
Others are less tough than they first appear. Some, like Powell, are newly-freed jailbirds trying to stay out of trouble: In Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951), Steve Cochran plays a sad case, a man who’s spent his whole life since age 14 behind bars for killing an abusive father. Paroled with no idea how the civilian world works, he stumbles right into an infatuation with hard-as-nails dance hall hostess Ruth Roman, who seems the worst possible influence. But once they’re forced on the lam (thanks to another abusive man’s demise), it turns out she, too, is just the embittered victim of too many tough breaks. It’s a story whose star-crossed-lovers gist recalls Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night.
In the same year’s My True Story, Helen Walker—whose career was derailed by DUI conviction for a serious accident—is also just out of the hoosegow. Hoping to go “straight,” instead she’s arm-twisted by former criminal confederates into getting hired as companion to a wealthy woman (Elisabeth Risdon) they want to rob. This involving tale was directed by Mickey Rooney, of all people—his only feature behind the camera, apart from something very bad later on called The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, which starring the inimitable Mamie Van Doren.
Hidden or erased identities, a common device in noir, surface in other discoveries on the program. Marsha Hunt is Mary Ryan, Detective in a very solid 1949 programmer—intended to kick off a series that failed to materialize—where her police sleuth poses as a professional shoplifter to infiltrate a fencing syndicate for stolen goods. Another cop (Richard Conte) goes undercover to investigate the mysterious deaths of medical interns in the next year’s The Sleeping City, which had the distinction of being shot on location at at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. But city officials forced the producers to tack on a prologue claiming nothing like the fictive events depicted (including staff abuse of drugs) would ever occur in real life.
Another unusual backdrop distinguishes the 1954 Hell’s Half Acre, in which a woman (Evelyn Keyes) whose husband had purportedly been killed at Pearl Harbor realizes he may still be living—in Hawaii, under an alias, and now in hiding from murder charges. Her search for answers exposes a seamy underside to Honolulu’s tourist-friendly surface.
Full program, schedule and ticket information for Noir City 22 can be found here. After its Bay Area run, the festival will travel to other cities through the year, starting off with Seattle next month.
Also opening this weekend:
I’m Still Here
This latest from Brazil’s Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries, On the Road) is the kind of movie that would be at the forefront of all current awards races—instead of trailing in a crowded pack—if Americans had more interest in the political history and conflicts of other countries. This dramatization of Marcelo Rubens Palva’s nonfiction account begins in 1970, when his family was living in suburban-style comfort near the beach.
Father Rubens (Selton Mello) is a former Congressman returned to civilian life as an engineer, though still a governmental critic in both open and covert ways. Amidst an atmosphere of heightened “security” by the military dictatorship he’d once had to flee, authorities haul him in, ostensibly just to sign a deposition. But that is the last wife Eunice (Fernandes Torres) or their five children will ever see of him. Soon she and their eldest daughter are also taken in for “questioning,” which turns out to mean interrogation under torture. Even when that ordeal ends, the patriarch’s fate remains unknown, and Eunice must figure out how to keep herself and her offspring afloat without him.
For non-Brazilians, it may feel like the 135-minute I’m Still Here spends too much time waxing nostalgic for the fashions, pop culture, and other youth elements of the principal era depicted. (Though that’s not surprising, since its source material is essentially the sole Palva son’s childhood memoir.) But the film is powerfully to-the-point when it needs to be, its eventual sprawl over decades anchored by Torres’ performance, which traces an evolution from upper-class housewife to dedicated activist.
In the latterday postscript, that role gets handed to the performer’s own mother Fernanda Montengro, whose flinty turn in Salles’ 1998 breakout Central Station made her the only Brazilian nominated for Best Actress—before Torres clinched a Best Actress nomination this week. The film opens at SF’s Opera Plaza and the Smith Rafael Film Center this Fri/24, then expands to venues throughout the Bay Area in coming weeks.
Dig! XX
Many consider Ondi Timoner’s 2004 Dig! to be one of the greatest rock documentaries ever—or the greatest, a claim laid by Dave Grohl in his onscreen introduction to this “extended and enhanced 20th Anniversary edition.” But its you-are-there saga of a gradually souring kinship between two great alt-rock units, SF’s Brian Jonestown Massacre and Portland’s Dandy Warhols, did not please everyone. In fact, the most vociferous critics were some members of those two bands, who argued the editorial emphasis on BJM leader Anton Newcombe’s frequently self-sabotaging ways was (somewhat) distorting. Nonetheless, the film no doubt brought them a lot of new fans, as well as some unwanted ambulance-chasing gawkers.
I haven’t seen Dig! since its Sundance premiere—when I loved it—so it’s hard to be sure exactly how different XX is, beyond its being 40 minutes longer and feeling (even) more chaotic. If the intent was to give more of a revisionist both-sides spin to the material, including new narration by BJM’s Joel Giron (in addition to the original voiceover from DW’s Courtney Taylor-Taylor), it’s unclear whether that comes off. Seeing even more footage from the purported 2500 hours shot over seven years’ course by Timoner does nothing to lessen the perception of Newcombe as a megalomanical, sometimes drug-addled “brilliant monster” who is seen attacking his band, his audience, label representatives, and anyone else within sight. But this edition isn’t always flattering to Courtney, either. And though their eventual success becomes an acute sore point for Anton, we also see how the Dandys experience the major-league music industry as “some evil beast that screws the artists.”
A new epilogue shows that two decades later the two bands remain alive and reasonably well as famous frienemies… and Newcombe can still make headlines by violently losing it onstage. If you’re not a fan of either, or both (but why wouldn’t you be?!?), you may be better off with the original-release Dig! than this 2.5 hour Big Gulp of underground rock excess. But if you are a fan, there can be no “too much” of this particular good thing. Dig! XX opens at SF’s Roxie Theater Fri/25. More info here.
