LATEST NO STOCKS DVD NO SPORTS NEWS ™ ALL NOIR www.noircity.com www.filmnoirfoundation.org VOL. I NUMBER 7 CCCC**** A PUBLICATION OF THE FILM NOIR FOUNDATION MONTHLY 2 CENTS OCTOBER, 2006 SPOTLIGHT ON Film Noir Featured at UNSUNG HEROES OF NOIR SUNSET BLVD. CLIFFORD ODETS Hollywood 3-D Expo By Marc Svetov By Don Malcolm By Alan Rode lifford Odets (1906-1963) was the Sentinel Managing Editor Sentinel Senior Editor American dramatist with the greatest he recent deluxe DVD edition of Cinfluence on film noir. In terms of Double Indemnity got me thinking THE WORLD 3-D EXPO FILM FESTIVAL II, dialogue and character portrayal he was at about Billy Wilder and his contribu- after a three-year hiatus, returned to the least the equal of the pre-eminent hard- T Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood September boiled American crime writers of that era tion to film noir. And that got me thinking about Sunset 8-17, featuring a collection of classics and (Hammett and Chandler) who created a Blvd. oddities that, in some cases, hadn’t been tough, urban, uniquely American language. No, not the thoroughfare itself, though screened in half a century. Odets listened to the streets—but he some of my fondest memories from youth Fortunately for pop culture enthusiasts invented a language; he had to pull it out of revolve around that legendary, serpentine and 3-D film buffs, Jeff Joseph, producer of a hat. At the point he arrives on the scene, journey from the Pacific Coast Highway to the 3-D Expo, reneged on the vow of 3-D there were no clichés to lean on—only an downtown LA, a drive more tortuous today abstinence he took immediately after the pre- inner voice. than ever before. vious Expo, back in 2003. The first festival Odets could listen, hear it and write No, I mean Wilder’s savage-yet-tender had taken an exhausting year to prepare. it. He fashioned the tough, witty, painfully send-up of the grim, bizarre facts of life in “Although Expo I was wildly success- honest and ultra-sarcastic talk we now asso- Tinseltown. ful, we swore we never do one again,” said ciate with novelists like Saul Bellow and These two noirs bookend the classic Joseph. “But then some film elements were Philip Roth. In addition, he fashioned a cer- “dark film” era, which really comes to its discovered, some studios started to be very tain cynical, wily Hollywood chatter—the Rubicon in 1950-51, as Hollywood’s purge helpful, one thing let to another … and here banter of the wiseguys, with words and reaches its final fadeout. While Double we are.” phrases that ensnare, go straight to the heart Mitchum and Darnell dangle in the 3-D and wound, heightening drama, starkly illu- Indemnity ushered in the hard-boiled crime The 3-D classic films shown during melodrama Second Chance. caper, raising Cain (as in James M.) to a new the festival were all 35 mm prints screened minating his characters’ inner workings. level of estimable nastiness, Sunset Blvd. using the ‘double interlock’ Polaroid system. The 35 features, screened over ten His stories are shot through with shined a shadowy, sinister beam of light into This system uses two cameras filming left- days, included several film noirs, including aspiring actresses, small-time hoods, mega- the underbelly of the movies, with a panache eye and right-eye images that are projected The Diamond Wizard, Inferno, The Glass lomaniacal producers, sacrificing agents, that is still amazing today. using two polarized filtered projectors that Web, I, the Jury, and Second Chance. The abused and tragic wives, go-get-a-buck-at- One interesting fact about this film is operate in synchronization. When the images first two films were exceptional and merit any-price wheeler-dealers and business- that Wilder’s mordantly witty dialogue and are projected on a screen that maintains the special comment. men—all the elements defining troubled, carefully crafted camp leads some people to polarization, 3-D glasses permit each eye to As the ‘right-eye’ negative for The tortured humanity in the big city. the conclusion that we’re not really in noir perceive the correct image. This system was Diamond Wizard had never been exposed territory at all. Let me debunk that notion by used to theatrically screen the classic 3-D prior to the festival, the screening of this film quoting a higher authority, the Czar of Noir films during initial release back in the early was a genuine 3-D first! himself, Eddie Muller, who tells it like it is at 1950’s and is vastly superior to the anaglyph The game was clearly afoot in The his web site: method that uses red and blue glasses to Diamond Wizard and there are few better (continued on pg.4, col. 1) view like-colored images. practitioners of the noir crime drama than ace scripter John C. Higgins (T-Men, Railroaded, Raw Deal, Border Incident, and CHANDLER SANS MARLOWE He Walked by Night). The underrated Dennis O’Keefe is an American agent working in the UK, tracking GRAPHIC NOVEL IS down diamond thieves that killed his friend BASED ON ’40s and fellow agent. It turns out that his erst- while girl friend (Margaret Sheridan) has a SCRIPT, NOT BOOK foreign-born Dad who looks nothing like her and is an atomic scientist who also happens Let’s celebrate the American release of to have disappeared before some authentic- an interesting “graphic novel” version of looking but artificial diamonds arrive on the Raymond Chandler’s original screenplay underworld scene and threaten to flood the version of Playback, which did not feature legitimate diamond market. When the clues Philip Marlowe, (It was only after the screen- start piling up, then Sheridan disappears, all Clifford Odets play was shelved by Universal—after hell starts breaking loose. shelling out $100,000 to Chandler for writing Even better was Inferno (1953), a top His work became more and more it—that it was transformed into the seventh notch film that proved once again that self-referential over time—later, the palette Marlowe novel.) movies don’t have to have complex story expands to include ruined, drunken actors, This screenplay was published previ- lines or be laden with special effects to be the hopeless and the doomed, dwellers in ously (The Mysterious Press’ Raymond richly entertaining. tinsel, cheap movie whores—anyone whose Chandler’s Unknown Thriller), but it’s taken The story has a classic flashback Robert Ryan plays an eccentric and integrity has been bartered away, a sweaty, twenty years for graphic novelists to pick up sequence early on, where the mysterious ruthless tycoon (a probable screenwriting breathless pantheon of the wracked and on it as a source of inspiration. woman, Betty Mayfield, is shown to have a nod towards Howard Hughes) who is aban- wounded. As is often the case, we see the French serious burden from the past. Her murder doned in the California desert by his beauti- He showed the underbelly of the go- deriving fresh inspiration in noir themes: conviction is overturned by a judge, and it is fully lethal wife (Rhonda Fleming) and her after-it ethic—success, which tastes bitter, Paris-based graphic artists Ted Benoit and a most unpopular decision, forcing her to go amoral lover (William Lundigan). As Ryan and then its myriad of indignities, the Francois Ayroles collaborated to produce a on the run. Her travels take her to Vancouver, struggles to survive in the Mojave with a shame of prostitution to gain it, those who rough-hewn, shadow-laden exercise in where she winds up mixed up in another broken leg, the nefarious duo who left him to have sacrificed everything to get the golden black-and-white that does justice to the visu- murder. In yet another plot element borrowed die cover their tracks and send the tortoise- ring—its worship in America, and its hol- al elements clearly present in Chandler’s from Laura, the policeman assigned to the like search effort in opposite directions. lowness. screenplay. (continued on pg. 3, col. 3) (continued on pg. 4, col. 3) (continued on pg. 3, col. 1) Oct., 2006 Noir City Sentinel 3 of J.J. Hunsecker was modeled on Walter (cont’d from pg. 1) Clifford Odets Winchell, because there were other colum- In a sense, he boosted failure—he nists at that time wielding such power; it saw human dignity was contained in the was a final handful of nails in the coffin, struggle, in a series of humiliations and con- and the day when these types of columnists tradictions, which formed depth and led could define what the public thought was often to a moment of truth when there gone for good. Odets’ concise, threatening comes a side-stepping of the hectic pursuit banter, ever drawing blood, is unbeatable of status and what is termed success; well, here. “Making it” à la film noir is defined as his was a vote for the losers. It remains, if going to hell down a sordid, increasingly you take him seriously, something revolu- slippery slope. tionary. Clash By Night (1952), directed by Odets was a politically aware writer Fritz Lang, is notable for its malicious dys- ing to the voice and persona of Philip Playback (cont’d from pg. 1) who nevertheless shunned even his own functional groupings of sad couples, with Marlowe. politics when writing about living human Paul Douglas dominating the picture, beg- case falls in love with Betty and tries to find The American edition, recently made beings.