Dispatches from Noir City D.C. (2024)
Noirvember came early.
SILVER SPRING, MD - Every year since 2008, the Film Noir Foundation, led by founder and president Eddie Muller (best known to classic film buffs as the host of Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley on Saturday nights) takes over Silver Spring’s AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center for Noir City D.C., a two-week gathering of the genre’s experts and enthusiasts. The programming of this year’s festival included film noir’s best-ofs and its b-sides, projected on 35mm and in brand-new 4k restorations, mostly shown in double feature presentations and hosted by Eddie himself during the opening weekend.
I had such a great time at the 2023 edition, I asked the folks at AFI if I could come back to cover another year, so the following coverage is thanks to them. This isn't me just kissing rear, AFI Silver is probably the best theater in the DMV, from the excellent programming to the always cared-for projection to the fact that they have one of my favorite beers at the snack bar. I got to hang there for the first two days of the festival and you can too by purchasing tickets and passes here.
Le Samouraï (1967) and This Gun for Hire (1942)
After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts, finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him.
Sadistic killer-for-hire Philip Raven becomes enraged when his latest job is paid off in marked bills. Vowing to track down his double-crossing boss, nightclub executive Gates, Raven sits beside Gates' lovely new employee, Ellen, on a train out of town. Although Ellen is engaged to marry the police lieutenant who's hunting down Raven, she decides to try and set the misguided hit man straight as he hides from the cops and plots his revenge.
The festival kicked off Friday afternoon with a little Noir 101, an intro class of sorts for folks who needed such a thing. In this opening double feature, we get both classic and neo-noir, American and international, two films that kicked off their respective waves of the genre and live today as the first building blocks of all that came after: Le Samouraï and This Gun For Hire.
We started in 1967 with Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, the lone-wolf hitman classic starring the late Alan Delon - the man who invented wearing a trenchcoat and fedora long after it was invented. There is very little to say about the film that hasn't already been said, but those who are unfamiliar with either the film or the genre as a whole might find it the perfect gateway drug from films like The Killer (1989), The Killer (2023), Ghost Dog, or Drive, to the black-and-white features mostly highlighted at Noir City. None of those movies would exist with this one. "Paid killer movies were not a thing," as Eddie explained in his between-movies chat. "Now, you can't get away from them."
Then, flashing back to 1942, we have This Gun For Hire, which Eddie called “the front end of the film noir movement in this country.” Made by folks who would go on to make movies like Double Indemnity and The Asphalt Jungle, and starring Alan Ladd (in a striking breakout role, he and Delon have the same silhouette) and Veronica Lake (who would quickly co-star with Ladd in The Glass Key, they have fantastic chemistry), Eddie bemoaned the screenplay, one he thinks is a tad middling, but I think it's an example of how to make every single thing in your screenplay pay off. When everyone appears in the final scene like the fifth act of a Shakespeare play, you realize all of that silly stuff, from pet monkeys to peppermints, from Frank Loesser lyrics (you really can spot those after only a few words, huh?) to laughably broken left wrists, from playing card bread-crumbs to crisp ten dollar bills, it all led us here.
Also screening as a part of this year’s festival on Monday, October 14 at 7:30pm.
Never Open That Door (1952) and If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952)
A man tries to avenge the death of his sister, a gambling addict. Another man, an ex-convict who whistles when he commits a crime, is reunited with his blind mother.
While playing a prank, a young boy accidentally discovers the identity of a criminal lurking in the neighborhood.
The theme for this year’s festival is “Darkness Has No Borders” and Friday night’s primetime presentation put that on full display with an Argentinian double feature largely unknown by noir audiences. In his pre-show introduction, Eddie talked about his relationship with Fernando Martín Peña, Argentina’s premier film preservationist, historian, and hunt-downer, the man who turned Eddie onto these films. Based on short stories by Cornell Woolrich a.k.a William Irish, the two films form a single noir anthology trilogy. Running originally over two hours, Argentinian audiences at the time would have been much more accustomed to 90-minute tales (as they should be), so the third story was lopped off and released weeks later as its own feature.
The first two tales are told in Never Open That Door. Eddie called this “a spectacular example of what they were capable of in Argentina” and after Melville’s cool blue French picture earlier in the day, the red-hot Latin melodrama of this film worked in complete contrast. The first story, "Somebody on the Phone," tells a tale of gambling debts gone too deep and the following vengeance that is film noir’s inevitable conclusion. The second half, “Hummingbird Comes Home,” is about a whistling bandit who, post-robbery-gone-wrong, hides out at his mother’s house - a blind old woman he hasn’t seen in eight years. Both films conclude with Twilight Zone-style twist endings, but their biggest strength comes courtesy of cinematographer Pablo Tabernero - the filmmaking alias of Peter Paul Weinschenk, a German Jew who had to flee his home country when the Nazis came to power. His work is magnificent, using shadows thematically as only this genre can, hiding secrets in the dark and revealing only what we’re allowed to know in the slimmest of light. The restoration, inspired by Peña and funded by the Film Noir Foundation, is stunning. Flicker Alley sells the picture on Blu-ray, which can be purchased here or at the merch table during intermissions of the festival.
The second film, If I Should Die Before I Wake, running barely feature-length at roughly 70 minutes, didn't look nearly as nice. As Eddie explained, we saw a "preservation, not a restoration" because the red tape surrounding the act of taking film out of Argentina is so cost and time-prohibitive, they didn't have the resources to restore both films and an executive decision had to be made. But that doesn't mean it's any lesser. The Grimm-inspired tale is about a boy who should have cried big bad wolf but never does. Lucio is a poor student, often earning ceros in his classes (a word I heard all too often in any class I took taught in Spanish) and finding himself in trouble. He knows there's a child predator lurking around his school and he can connect it to the recent string of young girl disappearances, but he never speaks out for fear of retribution. You can tell it's been padded out to resemble anything approaching feature-length, but it's also a prototype for The Night of the Hunter, and anybody who reads this website knows how much I love that movie.
I would probably characterize the entire triptych as thriller or suspense (or maybe horror if it's this time of year) before I called them noir, but who am I to argue with Eddie Muller, and who is to refute in any way the amazing preservation work by the entire team who put this together?
Also screening as a part of this year’s festival on Wednesday, October 16 at 7:30pm.
Assault on the Pay Train (1962) and Armored Car Robbery (1950)
Based on true events in Rio de Janeiro, in 1960, when a gang having the infamous outlaw Tião Medonho as a leader performed a sensational railroad hold-up on a train carrying a small fortune.
While executing an armored car heist in Los Angeles, icy crook Dave Purvis shoots policeman Lt. Phillips before he and his cronies make off with the loot. Thinking he got away scot-free, Purvis collects his money-crazy mistress, Yvonne, then disposes of his partners and heads out of town. What Purvis doesn't know is that Phillips' partner, tough-as-nails Lt. Cordell, is wise to the criminal's plans and is closing in on his prey.
Saturday brought a handful of heist pictures but, at first, no Eddie Muller. “I can’t even read the schedule to my own festival,” he quipped when he arrived to introduce the second feature on this double bill. I had heard him say the wrong start time for Saturday morning's first film the night before, but I thought he just misspoke or would catch his error. I wish I had said something!
The first film of the day was Assault on the Pay Train, a Brazilian heist film where the titular assault on the pay train is over by the film's fifth minute. Thinking it will improve their life situations, the five robbers learn that the world around them will always keep them down, shortcuts be damned. The commentary on the country's social and economic inequalities, stemming from the racism and classism that the film faces head-on, is much more exciting than any heist it presents. In what should be a surprise to absolutely nobody, the cops investigating the robbery capitalize on the situation and find themselves the greediest characters in the film. But apparently, that was a surprise to people, as I overheard someone during intermission say, "Every cop in that movie was either corrupt or incompetent." Yeah, we've been saying that. If the past few years (decades) on your television wasn’t enough, this movie is over 60 years old.
The second film, Armored Car Robbery, is a double feature's b-picture by definition: cheaper, shorter, economical in every way. It definitely provides more armored car robbing than the other film provides pay train assaults, only because it at least shows some preparation and planning for the big day - something I'm a total sucker for in heist movies. When they all stand around a map of the area (in this case, the Los Angeles Wrigley Field) and say things like, "You boys are gonna study this routine til it comes out your ears," as William Talman's character does, I'm in. But because I'm sitting in front of a movie programmed by Eddie Muller, the heist has to go wrong and a manhunt has to ensue.
Also screening as a part of this year’s festival on Thursday, October 17 at 3:45pm.
Hardly a Criminal (1949) and Plunder Road (1957)
A bank employee uses a loophole in Argentine law to concoct the perfect crime, planning to reap the rewards of his embezzlement after serving six years in prison…
A spectacular heist starts to unravel as the crooks take it on the lam.
When Eddie introduced the first film of my final double bill, he said, “This starts as a heist movie and ends as a prison movie.” Whoa, spoilers! But it turns out that’s the basic plot of Hardly a Criminal - it’s all about a guy who considers himself to be hardly a criminal. He’s a nine-to-fiver, tired of his measly salary and not making anything extra at the racetrack. When he realizes that the maximum sentence for fraud is six years, regardless of the amount, he crunches the numbers. A few years in jail for a lifetime of financial freedom? Easy. He cashes a fraudulent check from his company and quickly trades in his suit and tie for a jailbird’s black and white stripes. But again, this is a noir festival, so it's never that easy.
I originally planned to stay for all of Saturday's programming, but sometimes you have to know when to leave the party. Last year, I saw my favorite movie of the festival right before I left and this year, after I saw Plunder Road, my favorite new-to-me movie of the weekend, I knew I wanted to again leave on a high note. It's a lean, mean, man-on-the-run machine that fits a hell of a lot of twists and turns in its 72 minutes. Eddie's pre-show anecdote was so great (an amazing story about director Hubert Cornfield that he asked us not to repeat, so all I'll say is wow) and it was the perfect movie to see with a crowd that moaned and groaned at every roadblock. All I could think was this is why you come to Noir City: great movies, enthusiastic crowds, behind-the-scenes stories you won't hear from anyone but Eddie, and the best popcorn in town. Here's hoping I can make it again next year!
Also screening as a part of this year’s festival on Thursday, October 17 at 7:30pm.
Credit: Each plot synopsis comes from Letterboxd via TMDb.