A-B QUALITY FOR NC 16

The quality rankings for the films screened at NC 16 in San Francisco (ongoing through Sunday, February 4) can, like so many things these days, be shown in graphic form. Are A's better than B's? Will Manny Farber and his followers be outraged?

It's WAY too small a sample size to be taken seriously, but here goes:

For these films (12 of each, a comparison afforded by the structure of NC 16), A's outpoint B's by 7 points (84.7 to 77.6). The graph confirms this via its distribution across quality levels, with each sub-group showing something akin to a bell-curve structure even though we have only 12 films in each sample.

A larger sample from the full NC sample (or from a larger portion of it that can be readily identified using the "A-B" distinction) is possible...we will try to get to that at some point in time.

IMAGES FOR DARK SIDE OF THE DREAM

We are teaming with the great Elliot Lavine for a terrific film series called THE DARK SIDE OF THE DREAM, about what we call the "fantastic, frenetic foibles of America."

The series plays at San Francisco's Roxie Theatre March 23-26, with 12 films from 1933-1964.

Here are some of the promotional images we've devised thus far. More are in the works...

Who would've figured that you would ever see Jennifer Jones wielding a machine gun?e film in question is a long-overlooked but fascinating film by John Huston entitled WE WERE STRANGERS (1949), about revolutionaries in 1930s Cuba. The film also stars John Garfield (seen above in an image from BODY AND SOUL), Pedro Armendariz, Gilbert Roland and Ramon Navarro.  The film plays last--but by no means least--in a stellar lineup of films. We'll post the lineup shortly at the Blackboard and on all social media platforms.

NC SF QUALITY RANKINGS FOR DOMESTIC NOIR--40s vs. 50s

I was surprised to see that 50s noir showed up with higher quality percentages than 40s noir in terms of what's been screened at NC SF. But the number of films in each subgroup might be making a difference: 52% of all domestic (US-produced) noir screened at NC SF is from the 40s, while only 37% is from the 50s.

The ratio is a bit under 2-1 in favor of the 50s for those films with a 90+ quality ranking. For films graded 85 and higher, the 50s place 47% of the total films screened in that grouping, while the 40s manage on 37%.

On the trailing edge of quality, however, the 50s provide a much higher percentage of its films in the lowest quadrants than the 40s (21% vs. 10%).

So NC is showing more extreme films in terms of quality when it shows 50s noirs, and presenting a more balanced distribution of 40s films (with more than half of these falling into the "mediocre" range: 75-84.

NOIR-O-METER/TOP 25 POLL DATA SORTED BY "QUALITY RANKING"

Here is a different cut of the same data, showing the 77 films screened at NC SF (same films as in last chart) as sorted and ordered by the Quality Ranking assigned to them.

For some reason this chart could not be oriented to match the previous chart, which had the higher Top 25 rankings at left. Here, the chart goes from lesser quality (at left) to higher quality (at right).

Again, this is but a selected group of the films screened at NC SF, representing roughly one-fourth the total data set.

NOIR-O-METER/NOIR TOP 25 CORRELATION CHART!!

Embedded PNG chart for Noir-o-Meter/Noir Top 25 correlation per request of Mike Roz (Solomon):

Some notes:

--Only the NC SF films from the list were able to be brought over automatically into the file with rankings and noir-o-meter scores. Thus certain films from the Top 25 poll are not represented here.

--A larger data set using graded quality scores (NC database shows 330 films with quality scores from 62 to 99...effective range of the method is 50-100) would provide a much more robust snapshot of potential correlation.

CARPENTERS DIAGRAM

This is intended for linking in a discussion group where more details about the data will be shared.

If it proves unfeasible to link, this post will be expanded to include the textual commentary...

ESTHER HOWARD IN SWEETHEART SHOP

Images of Esther Howard as a young woman are exceedingly scarce.

She's so well-known for playing worn-out floozies and bug-eyed matrons that it's virtually inconceivable that she might once have been youthful (!) and attractive (!!).

Here's the proof, in a photo dating from 1920 and her big success in the Broadway comedy The Sweetheart Shop, where she was playing a character with a name that Preston Sturges should have been the one to think up--Minvera Butts.