A trip to "Noirvana"

Vick's Picks
by Vick Silkenpen

Noir City, the 14th Annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival

Yes, I’ve been a devoted fan of high pants films with hard-boiled dialogue for most of my life. However, when my partner gave me the fabulous book Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir by Eddie Muller in the late 1990's, I fully realized why I worshipped this twisted and brooding cinematic genre with femme fatales, quirky geeks, doper hopheads, washed-up freaks, corrupt cops and detectives in existential crises and more.

Muller tipped me off to my attraction to film noir's inventive craftsmanship, tongue-through-the-cheek humor and smoldering eroticism which coalesced to produce a unique black and white cultural art form. So it is no wonder that Muller continued my awe of his grasp of this genre as I very recently witnessed him introduce selected film gems from the sumptuous stage of the exquisite Castro Theatre in San Francisco when I attended his annual January festival.

Eddie thematically subtitled this year's Noir City as “The Art of Darkness: a collection of 25 noir-stained films exploring the pressures, pitfalls, paranoia and pain of being an artist in an indifferent and often cruel world. This time the tortured protagonists aren't felons or fall guys, they're writers, painters, dancers, photographers, and musicians.”

It was a 10-day cinematic celebration that ran from January 22 through January 31 and the cavernous but magnificently ornate Castro was packed out (more than a few in time-period attire) to view the thematically linked double and triple features.

Even though you won't quite get the same festival experience as sitting inside the Castro, the film list is worth running down and perhaps to have a one night mini-fest at your own place by showing some of these pairings: Rear Window and The Public Eye (photographers); The Dark Corner and Crack-Up (curators and critics); Los Tallos Amargos and Flicka Och Hyacinter (international noir); Deception and Humoresque (classical musicians); In A Lonely Place and The Two Mrs. Carrolls (Humphrey Bogart, artist); or The Picture of Dorian Gray and Corridor Of Mirrors (art collectors).

And there’s Love Me Or Leave Me and Young Man With A Horn (musicians); Screaming Mimi and Micky One (nightclub performers); The Bad And The Beautiful and The Big Knife (art? in Hollywood?); The Lodger, Bluebeard and Scarlet Street (painters); The Red Shoes and Specter Of The Rose (ballet dancers); and finally, Peeping Tom and Blow-Up (once again photographers).

Many of these clearly display the skills of extraordinary directors and actors but I personally and thoroughly enjoyed the wonderful photography in The Dark Corner (1946), featuring a very young and pretty Lucille Ball as a smart and sassy secretary for a troubled PI (Mark Stevens) being framed for murder. It is not only a satire of the art culture in New York but a highly "self-aware" parody of film noir as an art form which makes it totally entertaining. The cherry on top is the one-of-a-kind actor Clifton Webb reprising his unforgettable role as an effete aesthete from the earlier noir classic Laura. Webb does not so much chew the scenery as he dissolves it with acidic delivery. I can hardly wait for the 15th Noir City festival next January. It should be another trip to “Noirvana.”

The Gayly- 3/7/2016 @ 9:19 AM CST