Free stuff from FNB: Win ‘Body and Soul’ with John Garfield

October 6, 2012 by

Ed L. is the winner of the September giveaway. (The prize is “The 39 Steps,” recently rereleased by Criterion on DVD and Blu-ray.)

The October giveaway is one of the most famous boxing movies ever made as well as a stellar film noir: “Body and Soul” (1947, Robert Rossen). John Garfield, starring opposite Lilli Palmer, received a Best Actor Oscar nomination as did Abraham Polonsky for his original screenplay. Francis D. Lyon and Robert Parrish won the Oscar for best editing. Shot by two-time Oscar winner James Wong Howe.

To enter this month’s giveaway, just leave a comment on any FNB post from Oct. 1-31. We welcome comments, but please remember that, for the purposes of the giveaway, there is one entry per person, not per comment.

The October winner will be randomly selected at the end of the month and announced in early November. Include your email address in your comment so that I can notify you if you win. Also be sure to check your email – if I don’t hear from you after three attempts, I will choose another winner. Your email will not be shared. Good luck!

Filed Under: Noir Stuff Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Non-stop film noir on the big screen in Los Angeles

April 28, 2012 by

The enduring appeal of film noir shows no signs of waning – there are scads of noir screenings in and around LA over the next several weeks.

Noir City Hollywood continues at the Egyptian Theatre through May 6. Tonight, actress Julie Adams will talk with Alan K. Rode between the films 1957’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” (in which Adams co-stars with Richard Egan, Jan Sterling, Dan Duryea, Walter Matthau and Charles McGraw) and “Edge of the City” (1957).

And a must-see for me: Ida Lupino in “Private Hell 36” (1954) by director Don Siegel. Lupino also co-wrote this flick, which runs on Wednesday, May 2, after “Shield for Murder” (1954), co-directed by Howard Koch and star Edmond O’Brien.

In conjunction with the Herb Ritts: L.A. Style exhibition, running through Aug. 26 at the Getty Museum, a companion (free!) film series starts today. Ritts (1952–2002) was a top 1980s photographer and his preference for outdoor locations such as the desert and the beach helped to distinguish his work from his New York-based peers.

Admittedly, “Gilda” is the only true noir on the roster, but Ritts’ work taps retro Hollywood glamour. As the Getty puts it: “Ritts’ relationship with his subjects echoes certain director-actor relationships dating from the silent era and the eight films in this series showcase this special relationship.”

On Friday, May 4, the New Beverly Cinema is showing John Frankenheimer’s sci-fi neo-noir from 1966 “Seconds,” which stars Rock Hudson; cinematography by James Wong Howe. “Seconds” is paired with 1997’s “Face/Off” by director John Woo starring John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Joan Allen, Dominique Swain and Nick Cassavetes. Screenwriters Mike Werb and Michael Colleary are scheduled to appear in person.

Also worth a watch: Universal Pictures celebrates its centennial with a series of screenings (“The Black Cat” and “The Birds” caught my eye) at UCLA’s Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood from May 4 to June 24.

You’ll certainly get a full-on noir lineup at the 12th annual Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, which runs in Palm Springs from May 10-13.

Van Heflin and Joan Crawford star in “Possessed” from 1947.

Festival programmer and film historian Alan K. Rode has selected a great lineup, including Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (1953), starring Glenn Ford, and “Possessed” (1947) by Curtis Bernhardt.

Ford’s son Peter will attend “The Big Heat” screening. “Possessed” earned Joan Crawford her second Oscar nom (she won for 1945’s “Mildred Pierce”); co-starring are Van Heflin, Raymond Massey and Geraldine Brooks.

Other titles, screened from new 35 mm prints, include: “Shield for Murder” (1954), “I Love Trouble” (1948), “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” (1957) and “The Face Behind the Mask” (1941), starring Peter Lorre.

I’m also very much looking forward to The Sun Sets in the West: Mid-Century California Noir at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), from May 18-26.

Says LACMA: “Experience the dark side of modern living with this series of mid-century film noirs. Shot on location and set amid the bustle of major cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco – as well as their sun-soaked periphery, beach cities, and desert oases – these 10 films inject the Golden State’s benign climate with a heady dose of postwar angst.”

The titles in the series are: “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955, by director Robert Aldrich); “The Crimson Kimono” (1959, Sam Fuller) “Experiment in Terror (1962, Blake Edwards); “Criss Cross” (1949, Robert Siodmak); “M” (1951, Joseph Losey); “The Damned Don’t Cry” (1950, Vincent Sherman); “Slightly Scarlet” (1956, Allan Dwan); “Murder by Contract” (1958, Irving Lerner); “Nightfall” (1957, Jacques Tourneur) and “The Prowler” (1951, Joseph Losey).

The one and only Bogart

Additionally, UCLA’s Film & Television Archive and the Million Dollar Theater are presenting three interesting double bills in downtown Los Angeles:

Brian De Palma in the 1970s (“Sisters,” his first Hitchcockian thriller, and “Phantom of the Paradise”) on Wednesday, May 2.

“The hunted and the hunter” film-noir night, featuring “Mickey One” (1965, Arthur Penn) and “Blast of Silence (1961, Allen Baron) on Wednesday, May 16.

Nicholas Ray directs Humphrey Bogart in “Knock on Any Door” (1949) and “In a Lonely Place” (1950) on Wednesday, May 23.

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‘Sweet Smell of Success’ beautifully captures the sour stink of moral decay

March 17, 2011 by

Sweet Smell of Success/ 1957/ United Artists/ 96 min.

Michael Wilmington

This month, I am giving away a copy of Criterion’s new two-disc edition of “Sweet Smell of Success” directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Just leave a comment on any post in March and you will be entered; the winner will be drawn at random. Here, critic Michael Wilmington reviews this unforgettable film.

“Sweet Smell of Success,” an American movie masterpiece and one of the best and gutsiest of all the classic film noirs, is a sleek killer comedy/drama about Broadway in the ’50s.

It centers around two influential New Yorkers: megalomaniac star gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and one of his more energetic publicist-sources, scummy but fashionable Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis).

Falco, who wears a suit black as night, a dazzling white shirt and a poisonous leer that implies he’s seen something dirty and knows something even filthier, lives and dies each day by whether he gets a story planted in Hunsecker’s hugely successful column. Hunsecker, meanwhile, mostly holds court in the night spots that are his fiefdom, condescending to all the people, from Falco and other flacks, to movie stars to a U.S. Senator, who come to sip, smoke and pay him homage.

Hunsecker and Falco are unashamed users, almost proudly amoral. Hunsecker thinks he’s above morality; Falco thinks he can’t afford it now. Falco treats his potential patron with a fawning but mean-eyed servility. Hunsecker, with his ominous spectacles masking eyes of ice, freezes out Falco dismissively. “Match me,” Hunsecker tells the weasely Falco, in one of this movie’s many famous lines. Though Falco doesn’t actually scramble to light his cigarette, he does far worse.

Both these monsters have need of each other in this dark night and smoky day, in this world bounded by the Stork Club, Twenty One, Broadway and 42nd Street. Falco wants to use Hunsecker to ascend higher, into the sweet, smelly heights of Broadway gossip success, to become another Hunsecker.

Meanwhile, Hunsecker has nominated Falco for one of the dirty jobs he can’t get too close to: sabotaging the romance between his younger sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and her straight-arrow musician lover Steve (Martin Milner).

“Sweet Smell” deliberately patterned Hunsecker after one of the country’s most famous and powerful newspapermen Walter Winchell (1897-1972). Winchell’s daughter Walda was the model for Hunsecker’s sister Susan.

When you watch Hunsecker and Falco do their routines – snazzy, cruel, funny – you’ll never forget them. You’ll hear Hunsecker telling Falco, “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” Or Falco circling cigarette girl Rita (Barbara Nichols) and answering her query about whether he’s listening to her by wisecracking, “Avidly, avidly.”

Falco and Hunsecker are classic American movie characters, written with knifelike wit, commanding craft and true street genius by Ernest Lehman (who worked in this world) and Clifford Odets (a one-time playwright king of Broadway). It is directed with stinging life, energy and flawless insight by Alexander Mackendrick, an American of Scottish descent, who was one of the comedy experts of that British treasure-house, the Ealing Studio.

“Sweet Smell” was a sometimes-chaotic production. But Lehman or Odets never produced a better script. Mackendrick never directed a better movie. Elmer Bernstein rarely wrote a jazzier, sharper score. The master cinematographer James Wong Howe (“Hangmen Also Die!” “Pursued,” “Body and Soul”) never shot a darker, more brilliant noir.

Lancaster was sometimes more impressive, more richly colored and dominating, in tonier classics like “Elmer Gantry,” “From Here to Eternity” and “The Leopard.” But Curtis never topped Falco, not even in “Some Like It Hot.”

Lancaster was not Mackendrick’s choice for Hunsecker. He wanted Orson Welles or Hume Cronyn. It’s a weird piece of casting that works and it makes this a stronger, sexier and more subversive film. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Classic Noir Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,