FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT '24 PART ONE: THE SCHEDULE ON A POSTCARD

Much more about the first part of our grand finale can be found here and here, but here is the promotional postcard for Part One of THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT '24, screening at San Francisco's Roxie Theater from October 3-7.

Things kick off with the lone collaboration between Brigitte Bardot and Jean Gabin, and work through a fascinating look at rare 1930s noir, a special tribute to neglected director André Cayatte, both of which are part of the more exclusive "film club" series playing in the Roxie's screening room (very limited seats still available as of this writing). 

Then it's a glorious high-profile 1930s day on Sunday, October , with a double bill featuring the young Jean Gabin, followed by the magisterial 1934 version of LES MISÉRABLES, a three-part, four-hour epic featuring the great Harry Baur as Victor Hugo's embattled hero Jean Valjean. Of the 50+ versions of "LES MIZ," experts are in agreement that this is the best and most faithful adaptation of Hugo's novel--and it's thoroughly noir.

FRENCH '24 ends with a tribute to the singular monstre sacré Michel Simon, with two films where he is variably touched by madness. Our still from NON COUPABLE would be a fine choice as the image used in an illustrated dictionary for the phrase "fugue state."

When FRENCH '24 Part Two concludes on December 3, a total of 155 rare classic-era French noirs--the most hidden films in the film noir canon--will have been screened in the series since 2014. It's quite a legacy...

FIERY, COLORBLIND PHOTOGRAPHER EDGAR ORTIZ: CHICAGO NEO-NOIR

Tim Adams' Guardian article provides us with a good overview of Edgar Ortiz's Instagram account, where more than 400 images have been housed over the past two years.

What adds interest (and a tinge of paradox) is the fact that Ortiz is colorblind. 

His fiery images, many of which recycle motifs of lone figures crossing Chicago streets with various, sweeping background vistas, are thus working against his own visual limits. 

Only occasionally does he post a black and white image, but when he does, they are quite striking.

We are posting five of Ortiz's Instagram images from his account "Iamease" (if you have an Instagram account, type that into the application's search engine and you should be able to access his page).

The image that the Guardian selected to feature is one of Ortiz's best--we won't spoil it for you here. 

Be sure to click through in order to discover more about Ortiz's background (he is also a musician, and he is a late-blooming photographer.

As technology allows the movie-watcher greater ability to create still images, we see a stronger connection between the dynamic images in film and the "stop motion in frame" of photography.

As you scroll through Ortiz's images at Instagram, you can see a progression in his work.

Compositional angles become more diagonal and complex...

The same light source illuminates two different but connected image elements...

And he finds new ways to add texture to his images that stem from real-life light sources that take advantage of the weather conditions that are in play when he snaps his picture.

Just how "noir" these photos actually are in the context of "stark imagery" (particularly the high-contrast black & white images handed down to us from the classic "New York school" of street photographers) is open to question.

But it's clear that Ortiz is fascinated by pools of light and the shadows that surround them, and his work is more and more focused on the subtle, varied (and sometimes random) interplay of these elements.

And (below) there are some unusual, offbeat images that show that he has a well-developed sense of humor...

As Adams says, there is a tension in Ortiz's vision of urbanism: in his Guardian piece, he frames this as "one part Mean Streets, one part Yellow Brick Road." 

You are encouraged to follow Ortiz at Instagram, where street photography is one of the main attractions in a world often overrun by self-promotion. Edgar's world is all about what he sees, not how he presents himself to us. He deserves your attention...

NC PROSELYTIZES FOR NIGHTMARE ALLEY

Thanks in part to the pandemic, Guillermo del Toro spent the better part of four years bringing his version of NIGHTMARE ALLEY to the screen. He is a highly accomplished filmmaker, with a vast reputation for creatively extending themes and visual motifs in the horror genre, which resulted in an Oscar win for THE SHAPE OF WATER at the 2018 Academy Awards.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY was his followup, with del Toro collaborating with Kim Morgan (whom he subsequently married) in an ambitious effort to retool the legendary 1947 classic that starred Tyrone Power as the self-aggrandizing Stan Carlisle, destined to fall in a manner similar to the Icarus myth because he heedlessly "reached too high." Likewise, Kim Morgan aggressively seized an opportunity to step up from film critic to screenwriter, with the ostensible conviction that she and del Toro would be more faithful to William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 source novel.

Meanwhile, the Film Noir Foundation, friendly to Morgan over the years, organized a suite of written content in its house organ NOIR CITY that would focus on NIGHTMARE ALLEY, in part to pay lip service to the original film, but also to exhort its readership to embrace the new version. The film, while technically accomplished, is not substantially more faithful to Gresham's novel, but FNF head honcho Eddie Muller took up the gauntlet for it in a review that (as we noted in the excerpt from a more expansive evaluation of the just-released issue) he probably should have delegated to another writer. 

The excerpt below zeroes in on the thematic and narrative flaws and subversions extant in the del Toro/Morgan screenplay, which fatally compromises the notion that the screenwriting duo were more faithful to the source novel, and that they demonstrated "reverence for the 1947 film version," which is a sample of the whitewashing undertaken by Muller in his review of the film.

And, jumpin' Jehoshaphat, that's just what leads off the issue: carnival noir, as surveyed by poet, culture critic and new NC contributor Brent Calderwood, most recently writing for THE FILM EXPERIENCE. The feature starts well, but runs out of steam just the way that carnivals did (as noted in the intro) when urbanization overtook America's agrarian roots. Reading the feature's footnotes, one senses that they may have been provided by an editor to simulate a comprehensive list of film noir titles that were (even slightly) touched by the carnival. (Alas, two notable examples of classic French noir with strong ties to the "carny world" were overlooked: drop me a PM for the identities of these two films, as there's no reason to simply give away that information to those who don't quite complete their research assignments.)

It's followed by a condensed and retouched interview conducted by Calderwood with Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan as part of "the tout" for the new version of NIGHTMARE ALLEY. "Retouched" seems like a good description: del Toro is an eloquent fellow, but reading his responses really gives the impression that they were polished for publication. In it, there is his relentless attempt to connect his film with some form of ongoing political critique of America, while insisting that [William Lindsay] Gresham's novel is highly autobiographical (when it is more likely that Gresham's obsession with the world of the carnival and his fascination with the Tarot had coalesced into a richly lurid fictional depiction of a composite of characters he'd met or who he'd been told about). It appears that the "shut eye" concept--coming to believe in one's own patter about the creative project one is trying to put across to the public--may be enveloping the husband-and-wife team as well.

Finally, there is a review of the new film from Eddie [Muller], where he treads as lightly as possible on the production, positioning himself in the "rave with minor reservations" category. It's an interesting tap dance, where Eddie notes the Icarus theme of the original story but pretends not to notice how that is subverted by the filmmaker/screenwriters into a Oedipal tale (with additional scenes and pseudo-talismanic characters--the "pickled devil baby"--that do not appear in the source novel). He also states that he won't compare performances between the two versions, and--then goes ahead and compares performances between the two versions. (While he praises Rooney Mara to the skies, note that it's Coleen Gray on the cover of the magazine.) Eddie also endorses the "arming of Lilith Ritter" even while he tiptoes into an admission that "superfluous gore" seeped into the film--a significant portion of which came from giving Lilith a gun (and a strange body scar that also was not found in the novel). Frankly, given his friendship with Morgan, Eddie should've delegated the review to his "managing editor" Vince Keenan (Vince is actually "editor-in-chief," Eddie--that was a revealing Freudian slip in the email blast announcing the new issue...) or to someone else with no noticeable conflict of interest.

The new NIGHTMARE ALLEY has many strengths, but they are mostly technical. Even its supporters acknowledge that it is too lengthy; some of these (including Muller) note the strong uptick of violence, particularly in Stan Carlisle, who is not presented that way at all in the source novel or in the 1947 version. Muller attempts to suggest that such criticisms stem from the "churlish" curmudgeons who disdain virtually anything modern; but he simply runs away from the issue of the two films' comparative fidelity to Gresham's novel. He leaves what really matters about the true worth of the film unexamined, possibly in hopes of swaying the wobbly attendance figures that the film has been receiving since its fatefully delayed release on December 17 (originally scheduled for December 3 and no significant challengers at the box office, it lost two more weeks due to delays in completion of the final edit and thus ran into the blockbuster SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, which obliterated all of its competition from Day One and continues to do so as 2022 begins).

It appears that, barring an unforeseen turnaround, NIGHTMARE ALLEY's box office fate will be entirely left in the hands of what American movie moguls still call "the overseas market." The good news is that as a director originally from Mexico and with a solidly established international reputation, del Toro is solidly positioned to draw robust audiences for the film outside the US. (His Oscar winner THE SHAPE OF WATER, for example, did twice as much business in foreign markets.) He is already at work on his next film, a mixed live-action/stop-motion version of PINOCCHIO. His wife's screenwriting career may be another matter entirely, however.

PROSELYTIZING FOR FRENCH NOIR

We're not at all enamored of the recent coinage that has become an annual "event," particularly on Twitter: "Noirvember." Too slick, too glib, too calculated: strike three and you're out. But one suspects it will be with us for the foreseeable future. 

Which, of course, means that occasionally we find a need to use the term to our own advantage. Since THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT festival has been in operation, it's had its own monopoly on "Noirvember," given that it's the only film noir festival to actually occur in November. 

In November of '21, other places got  into the works. Two theatres in Boston featured "Noirvember" fests this year. One figures that it's only a question of time before the Film Noir Foundation decides to get into the act somewhere.

In the meantime, THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT got back in harness at the Roxie Theatre in San Francisco after a twenty-three month hiatus. (2021s schedule, segmented into an October "prequel," a November "main event," and a December "coda," brought viewers a total of 17 films, including seven festival favorites from previous years.) 

Above, a shot of French noir evangelist Don Malcolm at work in front of his "flock," and a look at the 2021 festival artwork, based on the poster art for one of the films in this year's festival, DEATH OF A KILLER (1964, directed and starring Robert Hossein).

ANATOMIZING PASTE MAGAZINE'S TOP 100 NOIR LIST

The accompanying table is the crux of our analysis of Paste Magazine's kluge-y Top 100 noirs list.

We call it that because the placement of the films based on their release dates (1940s-50s: classic; 1970s-up "neo") and the total number of films in each of these global time frames seems a bit too convenient. See if the pattern displayed in the table--sorted by poll rank and then distributed by decade--speaks to you in a way similar to the way it speaks to us:

First, the total number of "classic noirs" (late 1930s to late 1950s) just happens to add up to a round number (60). 

Second, the total number of "classic noirs" in the Top 30 is egregiously lopsided. Only CHINATOWN and BLADE RUNNER--two films seriously displaced from stories set in the present-day--made the cut. 

Third, that numerical arrangement permits the 70 subsequent films to split exactly between "classic" and "neo"--35 apiece.

All of this is just a bit too convenient...

While there are many films that clearly belong in a Top 100 list, there are some odd choices at various places in the poll, which also suggests that the list was arrived at "by committee" and not from any kind of empirical input.

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and THE BIG SLEEP are simultaneously oddball and mainstream choices for #1 and #2 on the list, which also suggests "committee" as opposed to something that would reflect a prevailing consensus (which would heavily favor films like DOUBLE INDEMNITY--which was rated #3--and OUT OF THE PAST--slotted at #7).

So--an odd, quirky, "kluge-y" list that could be picked apart by looking at the films as they rated by decade--which could reveal some seriously odd distortions. We don't have time to do that now, but we may come back to it later on. 

To read the full article (with copious commentary on each film included in the Top 100), click on this link:

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/the-100-best-noirs-of-all-time

USING THE NOIR-O-METER FOR "FACTOR ANALYSIS" OF TCM's "MARCH BADNESS"

Famous "barroom analyst" Eddie Muller has devised a sendup of college basketball's "March madness" that uses Twitter for the thing it was meant for: mindlessly entertaining polls that occasionally reveal something interesting within a sub-group. "March Badness" (a name doubtless conjured up after several libations) is an amusing conceit, but whether the poll means anything at all depends on how it is executed (and we don't mean choosing between the noose and lethal injection!). 

The voting is underway, and a few surprising results as the contest snakes its way down to the so-called "ultimate noir villain" have prompted us to look more closely at both the poll's initial construction and the related factors involved with each villain. Is there a predictable pattern in the voting results that might hold up no matter what pair of villains face off? The short answer: probably. Whatever art/artifice was used to generate the noir "field of 16" (semi-conscious choice, drawn out of a hat, ouija board) may not matter in terms of who wins. 

The long answer is below, focused on an interesting anomaly in the voting that cropped up in the first round: bratty little Veda Pierce (Ann Blyth) from MILDRED PIERCE knocked out the formidable Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) from OUT OF THE PAST. Veda is the only teenager on the list (though Annie Laurie Starr isn't much older, and certainly isn't psychologically) and yet there she is (as you can see in the table below...) ready to face off against giggling madman Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) in KISS OF DEATH.

That anomaly made me think that we can apply two control measures to create a form of "factor analysis" to predict results in these polls. I'll deal with the second first, which is simply the number of "rating votes" that the film in which the villain appears has received at the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB).

The primary factor for our purposes is a "noir element" taken from our old friend the "Noir-o-Meter," which those who occasionally frequent (is that an oxymoron?) this blog will remember (presumably neither wisely nor too well). The element that matters to us for "badness" is the "fatal(e)" element, which we make more verbose with the following: "degree of peril produced by fatal(e) characters." The element has a maximum of 15 points (out of the 200-point scale), so it has a good bit of significance in the overall method and it has enough room for gradation (which I've tried to make as systematic as possible). That said, it is still a subjective measure, and some will not agree with our conclusions (of course, some people never agree with anything).

The "factor analysis" is to compare the two films by the "fatal(e) value" and their likely familiarity to voters (the IMDB vote total). In the table (above) we show the "factor relationships" with a two-character code. If a film has a "fatal(e)" character rating higher than its opponent and it has more votes cast in the IMDB poll, we code it "xx." If it has a higher character rating but fewer votes, it's coded "xy." If it has a lower character rating but more votes, the code is "yx." And if it has both a lower character rating and fewer votes, the code is "yy." (Chromosomes, you can start your engines...)

There are two more possible categories we should mention, which occur if the character ratings are identical. With a tie score in factor 1, we assign a "z" to that factor, so a tie in the character rating plus more votes produces a "zx" code, and a tie in the character rating plus fewer votes creates a "zy" code.

What we see in the results is that the character rating code predicts the winner almost all of the time (at least thus far--we have only 7 results in from the poll as yet, so things could change). Any factor code beginning with "x" has a 5-1 record; only that Veda Pierce, with a character score well below that of Kathie Moffat and (surprisingly) fewer votes, pulled off a win with a factor code beginning with "y."

In the one case where the character scores were identical (Kasper Gutman in MALTESE FALCON and Johnny Prince in SCARLET STREET), the film with greater familiarity seems to have carried its anti-hero to the next plateau in "Eddie Muller's Badness Valhalla" (which is a great name for a stage act, BTW: "Eddie will be here all week--try the veal!").

So if we were to predict what will happen via the "factor analysis," we'd see Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) overcome his opponent Vince Stone's (Lee Marvin) greater visibility (check the IMDB vote totals: shockingly, THE BIG COMBO is the least-seen of these films). At that point, he'd be up against the Fat Man, and their character scores are much closer than the IMDB votes; thus one would figure that Gutman will win in the second round.

If Veda can take down Kathie freakin' Moffat, she's probably a match for Tommy Udo (particularly since Veda is young and lithe and has no need for wheelchairs). So in this bracket it's Veda vs. the Fat Man, and it's hard to vote against a man who enjoys talking to a man who likes to talk. In that scenario, Gutman is still on his seventeen-year quest to be the biggest baddie of them all ("not just in girth!" he grunts: "I'm not made out of lead...I'm no phony!!"). To which we say: thank God that Gutman is not made out of lead--he'd be the original immovable object if he were...

Over in the other bracket, we figure Phyllis D. (Barbara Stanwyck) will take down J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) thanks to the "xx" code (and that honey of an anklet: our male voters don't miss a trick!). In the other contest, let's first admit that the IMDB vote total for NIGHT OF THE HUNTER vis-a-vis DETOUR is just staggering, and since the two villains are tied in the Noir-o-Meter's "fatal(e)" category, we have to go with Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) over the fearsome Vera (Ann Savage).  So it's Phyllis vs. Harry in the semi-finals. 

And in that round, Phyllis will take out Harry, with the other bracket simply too close to call due to the "Veda anomaly." Gutman would beat Tommy Udo rather handily, but folks seem to cotton to these teenage vixens (says something sick about present-day society, if ya know what I mean...) and Veda just might commandeer that wheelchair from Tommy's victim, lure Gutman into it, and push him down the stairs!

Either way, however, I think it's safe to assume that the eventual winner of this is going to be the lady whose blonde wig freaked out Paramount's Buddy DeSylva so much that he compared his femme fatale to George Washington. Despite that lamentable attribute, Phyllis Dietrichson is almost certain to be the baddest when all the votes have been counted (except the ones they will be suppressing in Georgia). 

And at that point, Eddie may want to start to get worried when this is all over, and in one of his booze-encrusted dreams, Phyllis sidles up to him and says: "Bourbon will be fine, Eddie." Time to go on the wagon, Muller!

CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE NOIR-O-METER

A recent post at the Blackboard from Dan Hodges--long-time jouster against the "hard-boiled paradigm" that continues to distort the popular understanding of film noir--focused on problems of interpretation he encountered in discussions of the Cornell Woolrich "melo-noir" NO MAN OF HER OWN (1950), starring Barbara Stanwyck (in a role that gave that great actress much to work with on both sides of her emotional register--even though she is, like Joan Crawford in this time frame, often ten years too old for the parts she is playing).

Dan's aversion to the hard-boiled has only hardened over the years, but it appears to me that some of the noir/melodrama dynamics that we have discussed during those times have actually rubbed off on his writing. His claims for the greater emotional depth and avoidance of "deterministic" narrative sequences that we find in melodrama is at least an unconscious admission that noir needs to connect with a greater spectrum of human emotion in order not to become clichéd and formulaic. That said, melodrama also needs noir to sharpen the edges of that emotion in ways that connect it with life-and-death situations.

Dan spends many paragraphs discussing minute plot details in order to debunk an overly "hard-boiled" analysis by academic Mark Osteen. There are some good points in his argument, but he meanders within a series of actions within NO MAN OF HER OWN that don't really connect to one another. He's also a bit too concerned about the difference between the two competing source materials for the film (Cornell Woolrich, who often recycled and revised story elements, did just that with the material combined into the script for the film--the novel  I MARRIED A DEAD MAN and the earlier short story "They Call Me Patrice."

Though Dan remains innately suspicious of our Noir-o-Meter (see previous posts for details about how this "how noir is it" method operates...), we think that its ability to isolate the structural/dramatic roots of "noirness" via an integration of "hard-boiled" and "melodrama" (which we sometimes think of as Empedoclean forces at work within the aesthetic/philosophical underpinnings of noir) is just the ticket to establish a different viewpoint about NO MAN OF HER OWN that gets beyond most of the messy specifics and puts it (and other writings of Woolrich as adapted into film) into a context that is both coherent and consistent. 

Woolrich is unique among the major literary sources for film noir in his juxtaposition of psychological motivations for aberrant behavior and exaggerated, outlandish plot devices. This combination often produces a sense of dread that is often interpreted as being hard-boiled, but in fact is not. When the often almost transparent plot contrivances are superimposed, the formulaic aspect of pulp fiction is highlighted, which reinforces the perception that his narratives reside in the realm of the hard-boiled.

The noir-o-meter ratings for nine films adapted from Woolrich's work dispel this notion, however. The particular ratings that shine a light into this area are "ratio measures" that compare the intensity of "hard-boiled" elements in noir with the analogous strength of those elements derived from "melodrama" (or more traditional dramatic/theatrical structures). One of the surprises discovered via the application of this method was that the "melodrama" elements are stronger in application and intensity than the "hard-boiled" elements as they manifest generally across film noir. (In aggregate, the measures are about 12% apart: the "hard-boiled" element score 6.2 on a scale of ten, while the melodrama elements grade out at 6.8.) What we call the "melo rate" for noir sets itself at 112 as manifested in over 1,000 film noir titles. When we isolate on the character elements, where much of the meaning within the action is operating, we see that the relative strength of the hard-boiled elements is 89--reinforcing this general relationship by its opposite measure.

From there, the question shifts: where do Woolrich's films grade out using this scale? Are they all over the map, or do they show a pervasive pattern. If the former, we either have a stylistic/thematic inconsistency in Woolrich's work, or we have a method that doesn't (work, that is!). If the latter, then we would seem to have a method that captures tendencies within noir with a solid degree of accuracy.

And here are the results for nine Woolrich noirs (in the table below). The most intensely noir of the group is THE CHASE (1946), which features a highly menacing, borderline psychopathic fatal(e)-type character (Steve Cochran). Despite his presence, the overall "hardboiled" character score is only average (due to a triangle relatioship between Cochran, his estranged wife Michèle Morgan, and the beleaguered protagonist Robert Cummings). The early noir STREET OF CHANCE (1942), despite a somewhat plodding protagonist (Burgess Meredith) contains both menacing and ambiguous characters, but the relationships between the main characters are low-key, which (again) diminishes the film's "hard-boiled" characteristics. Three films with unlikely/unsuspected/unusual villains, PHANTOM LADY (1944), DEADLINE AT DAWN (1946) and THE WINDOW (1949), edge higher up the "hard-boiled" character scale while still retaining pronounced "melodrama" aspects. BLACK ANGEL's murder set-up is a combined blackout/wrongly accused plot (one that Woolrich was drawn to and used on several occasions) but the emotional connection between Dan Duryea (he of the "lost twelve hours") and June Vincent (the crusading wife of the "wrong man") keeps the hard-boiled at bay. 

And, along with NO MAN OF HER OWN, films with freakish coincidences, obsessive characters, and odd circumstances/backstories--I WOULDN'T BE IN YOUR SHOES (Woolrich at his most inspirationally contrived) and NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (his most atmospheric work, saved from its own hokum by a brilliant performance from Edward G. Robinson)--are the films most charged by melodrama, and with noticeably little hard-boiled characterization.

So what we see in Woolrich is a writer whose works work against the "hard-boiled paradigm," but who often finds himself lumped in with the other originating sources of noir (Hammett, Cain, Chandler and Burnett) who are more distinctly hard-boiled. Thus the methods within the noir-o-meter confirm a good bit of what Dan Hodges is saying about the narrative understructure of film noir, while (unlike Dan) suggesting that the dialectical relationship between the two forces is what makes these films distinctive and unique. The averages at the bottom of the diagram (removing THE CHASE, as it is somewhat anomalous in its intensity) show how Woolrich's work is pretty much the opposite of the "hard-boiled paradigm"--but is still as noir as it gets.