Film Noir File: Five stylish ’70s thrillers make must-see viewing

February 20, 2015 by

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Film Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard). All films without a new review have been covered previously in Film Noir Blonde and can be searched in the FNB archives (at right).

Jane Fonda won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in “Klute.”

Jane Fonda won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in “Klute.”

Saturday, Feb. 21

11 p.m. (8 p.m.): “Deliverance” (1972, John Boorman).

3:45 a.m. (12:45 p.m.): “Klute” (1971, Alan Pakula).

Sunday, Feb. 22

1 a.m. (10 p.m.): “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975, Sidney Lumet).

3:15 a.m. (12:15 a.m.): “Network” (1976, Sidney Lumet).

Monday, Feb. 23

12 a.m. (9 p.m.): “All the President’s Men” (1976, Alan Pakula). Burglary and other high crimes and misdemeanors in a soon-to-be-legendary Washington D. C. hotel called The Watergate turn out to be instruments of re-election for the Nixon White House in their no-holds-barred 1972 presidential campaign — as uncovered by two dogged, relentless Washington Post investigative reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman).

One of the best true crime movies ever: directed with neo-noir flair by Pakula, knowingly scripted by Oscar winner William Goldman (based on the Woodward-Bernstein book), with a first rate cast that includes Oscar winner Jason Robards (as crusty mandarin editor Ben Bradlee), Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Hal Holbrook, Ned Beatty, Jane Alexander and F. Murray Abraham. Maybe the best and most accurate of all “inside” dramas on American journalism and politics.

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Top reasons we love ‘Double Indemnity’

February 16, 2015 by

Double Indemnity poster

Yes, we’re still gushing about “Double Indemnity,” the film noir classic from 1944. And why not? It can still draw an audience, after all. ArcLight and the Skirball Cultural Center are showing “Double Indemnity” Monday night in Sherman Oaks.

Billy Wilder‘s great prototype film noir turns 71 this year and yet it never gets old. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson, the movie boasts a screenplay that Wilder co-wrote with Raymond Chandler, based on James M. Cain‘s novel, which was inspired by actual events.

Here’s why we hold the picture dear to our hearts, dearies.

14. As film noir historian and author Foster Hirsch once put it: “It’s the quintessential film noir. This is the mother lode, primary source film noir. It’s the basis for every film noir you’ve ever loved.”

13. Someone with the name Walter Neff turns out to be a tough guy.

12. All Walter has to do to escape punishment is sit tight. Yet, his ego drives him toward a final confrontation with his lover/partner in crime. He’s so damn human.

11. Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson is a fashion victim. She’s so damn human.

10. The first time Phyllis shows up at Walter’s apartment, she says she is returning his hat (which he supposedly left at her house) but the previous scene clearly shows him taking his hat as he leaves. Still, there’s so much tension between them, who cares?!

9. The door to Walter’s apartment opens the wrong way (it shields Phyllis on one of her visits) but you’re so caught up in the story you hardly notice.

As Billy Wilder acknowledged, no door in the world would open this way.

As Billy Wilder acknowledged, no door in the world would open this way.

8. You could buy Phyllis Dietrichson’s house for $30,000.

7. You could have a beer at a drive-in restaurant, served by a car-hop, no less.

6. The look of supreme satisfaction on Phyllis’s face at the moment her husband is murdered.

5. Stanwyck and MacMurray both took a risk and played against type.

4. Edward G. Robinson almost steals the show and it’s really a bromance between his character and MacMurray’s Walter Neff.

3. Raymond Chandler makes a cameo appearance, about 16 minutes into the movie, at Walter’s office building.

2. It’s perfectly paced – you can watch it over and over and it moves along lickety split every time, leaving you wanting more.

1. It truly ranks as a classic flick – it’s as fresh, sexy and funny today as it was in 1944. The writing, acting, directing cinematography, lighting, art direction are matchless.

Do you love “Double Indemnity” as much as we do? Then let us know!

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Film Noir File: A star-studded week of Oscar darkness

February 12, 2015 by

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Film Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard). Films listed without a review can be searched in the FNB archive on the right side of the page.

Pick of the Week

“A Place in the Sun” (1951, George Stevens). Friday, Feb. 13, 2:15 a.m. (11:15 p.m.).

Elizabeth Taylor as Angela and Montgomery Clift as George are one of the most ravishing star couples of the American cinema.

Elizabeth Taylor as Angela and Montgomery Clift as George are one of the most ravishing star couples of the American cinema.

George Stevens’ adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s classic crime novel “An American Tragedy.” It’s a melancholy look at a rising young working-class guy named George Eastman, who seems on the path to riches and romance, but whose dark impulses bend him toward destruction.

A great critical favorite in its time and still highly influential, “Place in the Sun” is a moody masterpiece about the wayward side of the American dream. Stevens’ movie also showcases one of the most ravishing (and ultimately sad) star couples of the American cinema: Montgomery Clift as George and Elizabeth Taylor as his dream, Angela. Also in the cast: film noir mainstays Shelley Winters and Raymond Burr.

Taylor and Clift were close friends off the screen as well.

Taylor and Clift were close friends off the screen as well.

Among the picture’s six Academy Awards were Oscars for Stevens’ direction and to screenwriters Michael Wilson and Harry Brown.

Thursday, Feb. 12
9:30 p.m. (6:30 p.m.) “The Third Man” (1949, Carol Reed).

5:30 a.m. (2:30 a.m.): “The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951, Charles Crichton).

Friday, Feb. 13
9 a.m. (6 a.m.): “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1945. Albert Lewin).

11 a.m. (8 a.m.): “The Bad Seed” (1956, Mervyn LeRoy).

1:15 p.m. (10:15 a.m.): “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962, Robert Aldrich).

3:45 p.m. (12:45 p.m.): “The Birds” (1963, Alfred Hitchcock).

Saturday, Feb. 14
8:45 p.m. (5:45 p.m.): “The Harder They Fall” (1956, Mark Robson).
2:45 a.m. (11:45 p.m.): “The Blackboard Jungle” (1955, Richard Brooks).
4:45 a.m. (1:45 a.m.): “The Man with the Golden Arm” (1955, Otto Preminger).

Sunday, Feb. 15 (Film Noir Day)
7 a.m. (4 a.m.): “Johnny Eager” (1941, Mervyn LeRoy).
9 a.m. (6 a.m.): “T-Men” (1948, Anthony Mann).
10:45 a.m. (7:45 a.m.): “The Naked City” (1948, Jules Dassin).
12:30 p.m. (9:30 a.m.): “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950, John Huston).
2:30 p.m. (11:30 a.m.): “The Blue Dahlia” (1946, George Marshall).
4:15 p.m. (1:15 p.m.): “The Maltese Falcon” (1941, John Huston).
6 p.m. (3 p.m.): “Key Largo” (1948, John Huston).
11 p.m. (8 p.m.): “The Defiant Ones” (1958, Stanley Kramer).

Susan Hayward with her Oscar.

Susan Hayward with her Oscar.

1 a.m. (10 p.m.): “I Want to Live!” (1958, Robert Wise). Susan Hayward won her Oscar for playing Barbara Graham, a real-life hard-nosed San Francisco prostitute. Graham was convicted of murder and facing the gas chamber.

But, according to Frisco crime reporter Ed Montgomery (played in this movie by “Psycho’s” psychiatrist Simon Oakland), she was innocent, the framed victim of a faulty justice system.

This riveting chronicle proves that Wise, a great favorite of French noir expert and Hollywood film aficionado Jean-Pierre Melville, was an absolute master of crime movies. The images are searing black and white. The acting is tough, smart, pungent. The jaunty modern jazz score is by Johnny Mandel, with the formidable Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax.

The ending is wrenching, unforgettable. So is Hayward.

Monday, Feb. 16
8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959, Otto Preminger).

Psycho poster 214Tuesday, Feb 17 (Crime Day)
7:30 a.m. (4:30 a.m.): “Fury” (1936, Fritz Lang).
9:15 a.m. (6:15 a.m.): “Monsieur Verdoux” (1947, Charles Chaplin & Robert Florey).
11:30 a.m. (8:30 a.m.): “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (1958, Mario Monicelli).
1:45 p.m. (10:45 a.m.) “In Cold Blood” (1967, Richard Brooks).
4:15 p.m. (1:15 p.m.): “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968, Norman Jewison).
6 p.m. (3 p.m.): “Bullitt” (1968, Peter Yates).
12 a.m. (9 p.m.): “Psycho” (1960, Alfred Hitchcock).

Wednesday, Feb. 18
8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “The Apartment” (1960, Billy Wilder).
12:30 a.m. (9:30 p.m.): “The Hustler” (1961, Robert Rossen).
5:15 a.m. (2:15 a.m.): “Lolita” (1962, Stanley Kubrick).

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Movie lessons on sex, death and being Jewish

February 11, 2015 by

By Michael Miller

Who hasn’t left a movie theater carrying the aura of the characters who have leaped from the big screen to leave their imprint on the audience, just as the taste of a fine entrecote steak lingers on the palate long after the last morsel has been savored?

Tara Ison

Tara Ison

This feeling of being a participant in what she has seen, rather than an observer, has had a profound effect on author Tara Ison. In her insightful new book she analyzes how movies have influenced different aspects of her life, including sex, death and being Jewish.

In “Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies” (Soft Skull Press. $15.95 soft cover), Ison delves into her inner-self in a series of “How to…” essays such as “How to be Lolita,”  “How to Die with Style” and “How to be a Jew.”

Ison’s first Lolita-ish movie experience came at the tender age of six when her parents  took her to see “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” in which one of Miss Brodie’s pupils, 17-year-old Sandy, played by Pamela Franklin, is seduced by art teacher Teddy Lloyd (Robert Stephens).

Later, when Ison herself is 17 and yearning to be seduced, she revisits the scene in which Sandy taunts her lover, saying, “How much longer are you going to be tempted by this firm young flesh?” Replies Teddy, “Until you’re 18 and over the hill.”

The words haunt her as she watches 13-year-old Lolita, played by Sue Lyon in the film of the same name, having her sex with the nymphet-fixated much older Humbert (James Mason). Ison realizes that the days of her “firm young flesh” falling to the temptations of seduction are numbered. “What am I? I am seventeen now, and I have only just, at last, gotten my first period. Hello, womanhood,” she bemoans.

But fear not, dear reader, sex is just a few chapters away. In “How to be a Slut,” our heroine relates how she not only blossomed as a promiscuous lover, but did so with both men and women. By her mid-twenties, “I am having delightful or tortured affairs, thrilling sex, falling in lust all over the place.”

The film “Lolita” reminded Tara Ison that youth passes quickly.

The film “Lolita” reminded Tara Ison that youth passes quickly.

Later she falls in love with her best girlfriend and, in an effort to learn “How to be a Lesbian,” starts watching “dreadful movies” that “show lesbian sex in the blandest, most boring way possible.” “Thankfully I go on to sleep with a lot of other women and erase those tepid or faux-lesbian images from my mind forever,” she writes.

Born to a Lutheran father and Jewish mother in Los Angeles, Ison says religion was never a factor in her early childhood. In fact, she was hardly aware of being a Jew – until she was seven and was taken to see the movie version of “Fiddler on the Roof,” starring Topol as the Russian Jewish peasant Tevye, a poor milkman who dreams of being rich one day.

She recalls not so much watching the film, set in the 1890s, but injecting herself into it as one of Tevye’s daughters, delighting in the life of a poor but happy Jewish family. “Our Jewishness is made luminous with candles and copper kettles and fresh milk. We glow with our Jewishness. I became a Jew when I was seven.”

Ison’s introduction to death came at the age of six. In a movie, naturally. It was “Love Story,” the tale of two young lovers, played by Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, in which MacGraw’s character dies a slow but painless death due to a mystery illness. Then, three years later, death becomes personal when a close friend of the family dies painfully of cancer at the age of 34, and Ison remembers the line from “Love Story,” “A girl like that, so alive, so entitled to live.”

REELING bookIson felt death’s breath herself in her early twenties when she suffered a grand mal seizure and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She immediately set about planning her death with dignity, planning to go out like Maude, played by Ruth Gordon, in “Harold and Maude” who secretly takes an overdose of pills to hasten her death and is last seen being happily wheeled off on a hospital gurney, twirling a daisy.

“If I can orchestrate the circumstances of my death, then of course I can be all ready,” writes Ison. “I can meet it beautifully and finely. For months I had been feeling I had a life without the living; now I can have the death without the dying.”

It turned out, however, that Ison did not have a brain tumor, merely a benign cyst. Now she is left to wonder again what death has in store for her. “Will I have lived a life that makes me ready to meet death beautifully and finely? Or will I fight to the last, try to barricade that door, claim every last second, last breath, last beat of my heart before it is the end of the thing that is me, and the thing that is me disappears for ever?”

Tara Ison is the author of the novels “The List,” “A Child Out of Alcatraz,” a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and “Rockaway,” selected as a 2013 Best Books of Summer by O Magazine. She is also co-writer of the cult film, “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.”

Michael Miller is a Los Angeles-based writer.

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‘Thelma Jordon’ shows Stanwyck at near her bad-best

February 10, 2015 by

The File on Thelma Jordon/1950/Paramount Pictures/100 min.

By Michael Wilmington

“The File on Thelma Jordon” plays at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 12, at the Skirball Cultural Center, the final film in The Intriguante—Women of Intrigue in Film Noir series.

The File on Thelma Jordon posterBarbara Stanwyck, one of the smartest and toughest of all the classic Hollywood femmes fatales, was terrific at playing earthy babes who knew their way around a bedroom – and sometimes a courtroom or an insurance office as well. She made a schnook out of policy-seller Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity.” She put Van Heflin and Kirk Douglas through the wringer in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.”

And, as the hard-boiled man-killer in “The File on Thelma Jordon,” she gives the business to the seemingly solid and non-malleable Wendell Corey, playing a district attorney named Cleve Marshall. The DA draws the touchy assignment of prosecuting Thelma for the murder of her elderly, very wealthy aunt.

Paul Kelly plays Cleve’s suspicious buddy, Joan Tetzel his not-suspicious-enough wife. Stanwyck, of course, is the gal who arouses those suspicions as well as a lot of good old-fashioned Golden Age Hollywood desire.

Corey (marvelous as a psycho in Budd Boetticher’s 1956 budget noir thriller “The Killer is Loose”) is surprisingly effective in “Thelma Jordon” as a straight-arrow guy. He’s tough and savvy, sure, but Thelma bends him like a Charleston Chew.

Barbara Stanwyck was never bashful about playing bad girls or loose women or even murderesses.

Barbara Stanwyck was never bashful about playing bad girls or loose women or even murderesses.

Stanwyck eats parts like this (and guys like this) for lunch. She was one Hollywood star who was never bashful about playing bad girls or loose women or even murderesses. She always knew just the right touch of acid (or whiskey) to drop into her milk and honey come-ons.

Thelma Jordon doesn’t sport a nasty-girl blonde wig like Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson in “Double Indemnity,” but she’s adept at skirting the law and lawyers. First a scheming opportunist who keeps very bad company, then an adulteress and finally a woman accused of an awful murder, Thelma’s a real dark-side knockout.

The movie’s director is one of the authentic masters of film noir: the great German émigré and expressionist puppeteer of twisted people and sinister streets, Robert Siodmak (“The Killers,” “Criss Cross,” “Phantom Lady”). Siodmak is visually right in his element here. Working with classy cinematographer George Barnes (“Spellbound”), he pulls us into an inky cinematic pool of psychological havoc and guilt.

The writer of “Thelma Jordon,” Ketti Frings, was no stranger to noir either, having penned thrillers such as “Guest in the House,” “The Accused” and “Dark City.” (Eventually she won a Pulitzer Prize for her stage version of Thomas Wolfe’s novel “Look Homeward Angel.”) Here, she shows Thelma spinning her webs, Cleve flying into them and everything getting darker and deadlier. And damned if Frings, Siodmak and Stanwyck don’t get some sympathy for Thelma as well.

This is Stanwyck at near her bad-best, Siodmak at his darkest and most Teutonically stylish. No, I don’t know why they spell Jordon with two “o’s.” But, like Wendell Corey, I won’t argue with the lady, especially when the lights go down.

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Skirball Cultural Center shows ‘The File on Thelma Jordon’ starring the grande dame of film noir

February 10, 2015 by

The Intriguante—Women of Intrigue in Film Noir series at the Skirball Cultural Center continues at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 12, with a movie starring the grande dame of film noir: Barbara Stanwyck.

Thelma Jordon (Barbara Stanwyck) asks: Why evade the law when you can simply seduce a lawman?

Thelma Jordon (Barbara Stanwyck) asks: Why bother to evade the law when you can simply seduce a lawman? Wendell Corey plays her snoozing companion.

In “The File on Thelma Jordon” (1950, Robert Siodmak), a film-noir melodrama, Stanwyck’s Thelma is a woman with a past and an ex-boyfriend who convinced her walk on the bad side. But rather than try to evade the law, she decides instead to seduce a married district attorney (Wendell Corey). When Thelma’s aunt is murdered, the DA is definitely the dude to have on her side. Still, guilt has a way of getting the best of a person, and it even gets to the cool, clever and mightily destructive Ms. Jordon.

Siodmak’s crisp, stylish directing paired with a tight script and Stanwyck’s powerful characterization make “The File on Thelma Jordon” a delightful big-screen treat.

Six years before “Thelma Jordon,” Stanwyck made “Phantom Lady” with Siodmak. Of course, one of Stanwyck’s most famous roles was as the murderous Phyllis Dietrichson in 1944’s “Double Indemnity,” directed by Billy Wilder.  Stanwyck and co-star Fred MacMurray took a risk by playing such dark characters in that they might alienate their fan base. But the risk paid off and they proved remarkably capable of playing a range of roles.

The exhibitions close on Sunday, March 1.

The exhibitions close on Sunday, March 1.

Stanwyck went on to star in many more film-noir titles, including “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers,” “The Two Mrs. Carrolls,” “Sorry, Wrong Number,” “No Man of Her Own,” “Clash by Night,” and “Crime of Passion.”

Admission is $10 general; $7 seniors and full-time students; $5 members. The exhibitions Light & Noir: Exiles and Émigrés in Hollywood, 1933–1950 and The Noir Effect will remain open until 8 p.m.

The exhibitions close on Sunday, March 1. If you haven’t seen them yet, what are you waiting for?! At 11 a.m. on March 1, the center will screen the PBS documentary Cinema’s Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood, which explores the impact of movie icons such as Wilder, Fritz Lang, Fred Zinnemann and Marlene Dietrich.

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Remembering Lizabeth Scott, a film noir stalwart

February 6, 2015 by
Lizabeth Scott was born Emma Matzo on Sept. 29, 1922, in Scranton, Pa.

Lizabeth Scott was born Emma Matzo on Sept. 29, 1922, in Scranton, Pa.

Actress Lizabeth Scott died Jan. 31 of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was 92.

Dead_Reckoning poster

Scott was born Emma Matzo on Sept. 29, 1922, in Scranton, Pa., one of six children. Her parents emigrated from the Ukraine.

Sculpted, slim and statuesque, Scott was a film noir stalwart, known for such classics as “Dead Reckoning,” “Pitfall” and “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.” Other notable ’40s flicks include: “Desert Fury,” “I Walk Alone,”  “Too Late for Tears” and “The Racket.”

Scott tended to play alluring, brassy girls who lived by their wits and worldly charms, having been born on the wrong side of the tracks. That said, she was equally adept at portraying tough cookies who revealed hearts of gold. Underrated in her time, she was able to lend complexity to many of her roles.

Simply put, she was a trooper.  Her other credits include: “Easy Living,” “Paid in Full,” “Dark City,” “The Company She Keeps,” “Two of a Kind,” “Red Mountain,” “A Stolen Face,” “Scared Stiff,” “Bad for Each Other” and “Silver Lode.”

You can read a full obituary here.

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Film Noir File: Siodmak’s ‘The Killers’ is a must-see heist film, Hemingway style

February 6, 2015 by

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Film Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). All movies below are from the schedule of TCM, which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

Pick of the Week

Burt Lancaster instantly falls for Ava Gardner in “The Killers.”

Burt Lancaster instantly falls for Ava Gardner in “The Killers.”

“The Killers” (1946, Robert Siodmak). Tuesday, Feb. 10, 10:15 p.m. (7:15 p.m.). Of all film noir’s femmes fatales, Ava Gardner as Kitty Collins in “The Killers” ranks as the most devastatingly efficient. She doesn’t waste time chit-chatting or getting to know a guy. Just a glance gets them hooked and firmly planted in the palm of her hand. “Swede” Andreson (Burt Lancaster) takes all of 10 seconds to fall for her and then get lured into “a double-cross to end all double-crosses.” Read the full review here.

Saturday, Feb. 7

11:45 p.m. (8:45 p.m.): “Citizen Kane” (1941, Orson Welles). A dark look at the sensational, profligate life of one of the world’s most powerful and egotistical newspaper magnates, the late Charles Foster Kane (modeled on William Randolph Hearst and acted by George Orson Welles). Still the greatest movie of all time, it’s also a virtual lexicon of film-noir visual and dramatic style, as seminal in its way as “The Maltese Falcon” or “M.” Scripted by Welles and one-time Hearst crony Herman Mankiewicz, photographed by Gregg Toland, with music by Bernard Herrmann and ensemble acting by the Mercury Players: Welles, Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, George Coulouris, Ruth Warrick, Paul Stewart, et al.

Sunday, Feb. 8

Bogart and Bergman play Rick and Ilsa, who are perhaps Hollywood’s most famous on-screen lovers.

Bogart and Bergman play Rick and Ilsa, who are perhaps Hollywood’s most famous on-screen lovers.

10 p.m. (7 p.m.): “Casablanca” (1942, Michael Curtiz).

12 a.m. (9 p.m.): “Gaslight” (1944, George Cukor). Set in foggy Victorian gas-lit London, this is the best of all the melodramas and noirs where a bad husband tries to drive his wife insane (or vice versa). Here, Charles Boyer gives the treatment to Oscar-winner Ingrid Bergman. Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty and teenage Angela Lansbury are among the bystanders. Based on the Patrick Hamilton stage play (and film) “Angel Street.”

Monday, Feb. 9

Laura poster 2141 a.m. (10 p.m.): “Laura” (1944, Otto Preminger).

3 a.m. (12 a.m.): “Mildred Pierce” (1945, Michael Curtiz).

Tuesday, Feb. 10

7 a.m. (4 a.m.): “Julie” (1956, Andrew L. Stone). The same year she sang “Que Sera, Sera” for Hitchcock as the menaced mom in Hitch’s remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” Doris Day played a comely stewardess stalked by her psycho ex-husband, Louis Jourdan, in this lady-in-distress thriller from the poor man’s Hitchcock, Andrew Stone.

9 a.m. (6 a.m.): “Crossfire” (1947, Edward Dmytryk).

10:30 a.m. (7:30 a.m.): “Suspicion” (1941, Alfred Hitchcock).

12:30 p.m. (9:30 a.m.): “Mystery Street” (1950, John Sturges). A good, smart police procedural, set partly at Harvard University, with a homicide cop and forensic scientist (Ricardo Montalban and Bruce Bennett), trying to crack a murder with sexual overtones.

Cary Grant was Hitch’s favorite actor.

Cary Grant was Hitch’s favorite actor.

2:15 p.m. (11:15 a.m.): “The Fallen Idol” (1948, Carol Reed). In 1948, a year before they made the nonpareil thriller “The Third Man,” director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene collaborated on another tilted-camera film-noir classic: this mesmerizing story of a French diplomat’s son(Bobby Henrey) , who hero-worships the embassy butler (Ralph Richardson). The boy mistakenly comes to believe his idol has murdered his wife and keeps unintentionally incriminating him. With Michele Morgan, Jack Hawkins and Bernard Lee. Stunning cinematography by Georges Perinal.

4 p.m. (1 p.m.): “After The Thin Man” (1936, W. S. Van Dyke). The first of many sequels to the smash hit 1934 movie of Hammett’s last novel “The Thin Man,” with William Powell and Myrna Loy as the peerlessly witty and stylishly sloshed Nick and Nora Charles. Here, they visit Nora’s San Francisco cousin and investigate a string of murders among her rich elite family. With Jimmy Stewart in one of his most atypical roles.

6 p.m. (3 p.m.): “Charade” (1963, Stanley Donen). Director Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone’s lush, polished and witty Hitchcock imitation stars Hitch’s favorite actor Cary Grant in perhaps his most Cary Grantian performance. Here, he’s a romantic detective/spy (or is he?) in an ultra-posh comedy thriller co-starring Audrey Hepburn, at her most winsomely, delicately beautiful. The movie, probably Donen’s best-loved after his great musicals “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Funny Face,” seems to be composed of equal parts of “North by Northwest,” “Notorious,” “To Catch a Thief” and Donen’s own Cary Grant movies (like “Indiscreet” and “The Grass is Greener”), with a dash of ’60s New Wave sauce and sass.

Cary Grant (shown with Audrey Hepburn) is one of FNB’s favorite actors.

Cary Grant (shown with Audrey Hepburn) is one of FNB’s favorite actors.

The movie couldn’t exist without Grant, who, mostly in a very Hollywoodish Paris, woos lady-in-distress Audrey (or does she woo him?). Both of them are threatened by a stellar band of villains and nemeses that includes Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy and Ned Glass. The moody title song (Henry Mancini /Andy Williams) earned an Oscar nom. No Oscars went to Grant, of course. The next year, while picking up his Academy Award for writing the Grant comedy vehicle “Father Goose,” Stone said, “Cary just keeps winning these things for other people.”

Wednesday, Feb. 11

Treasure of the Sierra Madre poster8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “All the King’s Men” (1949, Robert Rossen).

2 a.m. (11 p.m.): “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948, John Huston). “Treasure” is perhaps the finest work by writer-director (and here, for the first time, actor), John Huston. It’s a supreme western noir and one of the great Humphrey Bogart pictures.

Bogart is Fred C. Dobbs, a down and out American in 1925 in Tampico, Mexico, who hooks up with two other Yanks: tough but decent Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) and fast-talking, grizzled, expert prospector Howard (John’s father Walter Huston; he won the Oscar). The three treasure hunters strike gold in the Sierra Madre mountains, but they also hit a vein of darkness: the discord and violence that sudden riches can bring.

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Happy birthday, Ida Lupino!

February 4, 2015 by

Ida Lupino in halterIda Lupino was born Feb. 4, 1918 in London and died, age 77, on Aug. 3, 1995 in Los Angeles.

Says the New Yorker’s Richard Brody on Lupino: “As an independent producer, director and screenwriter, she exercised an exceptional degree of authority over her films, and it shows in their coherence, consistency and originality.”

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‘Libeled Lady’ is funny and fresh at 79 years old

February 3, 2015 by
Myrna Loy, William Powell, Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy in “Libeled Lady.”

Myrna Loy, William Powell, Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy in “Libeled Lady.”

The ever-delightful “Libeled Lady” (1936, Jack Conway) kicked off a private screening series from the lovely people at Black Maria on Friday night at the Cinefamily in Los Angeles. The idea is to show films on the big screen in unique venues around the country.

The inaugural event included free food (plus popcorn and soda), drinks, a raffle with great prizes, free DVDS from Warner Bros. Archives and music from Elana James.

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