A Double Dose of Noir

Starting Thursday, Vancouver’s Cinematheque will spend the month of August screening both classic noirs that check all the boxes and outliers that bend the rules. The series with the straightforward title Film Noir 2024 opens with Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), starring Rita Hayworth as a sultry dancer who sends the heads of her gambling ex and her new gangster husband spinning.

“Gilda is a destabilized hybrid of polished studio musical and pitch-black noir,” writes Sheila O’Malley. “The mood is violent, sexual, chaotic. Hayworth is often shot in complete darkness, not even a bar of light across her eyes. Characters’ shadows on the walls are so elongated that they appear to be detached sentient beings.”

Later on Thursday night, a parallel program, A Shadow Is Haunting the World: International Noir, will open with Le samouraï (1967), directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and starring Alain Delon as “an ice-cold assassin above such mundane concerns as moral conscience,” as the late William Friedkin once put it. Le samouraï “operates in a kind of dream state. It’s the opposite of the fevered emotional style of most gangster films. The pauses and silences help make it the visual equivalent of Harold Pinter’s dialogue.”

Next up in the international series is Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), “a fable of moral corruption in a world of near-Byzantine visual complexity” that’s “probably the greatest British thriller of the postwar era,” as Michael Wilmington wrote in 1999. The Cinematheque chases that stone-cold classic with a film that stretches traditional definitions of noir, Patrick Tam’s My Heart Is That Eternal Rose (1989), which arrives on the Criterion Channel on Thursday—alongside, by the way, a program we’re calling Vacation Noir, featuring Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Purple Noon (1960), and other tales of murder in broad daylight.

Set in Hong Kong and shot by Christopher Doyle, My Heart Is That Eternal Rose “falls somewhere between John Woo’s bullet-riddled ballets and Douglas Sirk’s romantic melodramas,” wrote Mick Gaw for Screen Slate earlier this year. “With its synth-heavy score and multi-colored nightclub sets, this gem is not only a moving portrait of doomed romance, but it also laid the groundwork for many of the territory’s most iconic films.”

Victims of Sin (1951), directed by Emilio Fernández and starring Cuban fireball Ninón Sevilla, is “a hallmark of the golden age of Mexican cinema and one of the very best examples of the cabaretera film, an offshoot of the popular ‘prostitute melodrama’ genre set in cabarets and involving elaborate music and dance sequences,” writes Jacqueline Avila. The program wraps with Juliet Berto’s directorial debut, Neige (1981), codirected with her then-partner, Jean-Henri Roger, shot by William Lubtchansky, and set in the Pigalle district of Paris, where addicts panic when the police kill their dealer. Berto’s Neige is “suffused with nightlife ambiance and the leftist radicalism of her youth,” writes Elissa Suh at Screen Slate.

The selection of American noirs includes two by Raoul Walsh: The Man I Love (1947), starring Ida Lupino as a singer who falls for a down-on-his-luck jazz pianist, and White Heat (1949), with James Cagney’s psychotic gangster famously exclaiming as everything around him goes up in flames, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” The Cinematheque will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Lauren Bacall with a screening of Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944), the movie in which she was paired for the first time with Humphrey Bogart and posed the question “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?”

Robert Ryan stars in two films in the program: Act of Violence (1948), which Fernando F. Croce calls “Fred Zinnemann’s best film, in that noir unease forces a tremor into the craftsman's decorum,” and Max Ophuls’s Caught (1949). “Ophuls’s psychologically sophisticated film has much to say about gender and capital,” writes Mark Asch, “and Ryan’s performance in particular has much to say about masculinity, power, and insecurity.” Two Treasury agents infiltrate a counterfeiting ring in T-Men (1947), a semidocumentary best known for its pairing of director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton.

Circling back around to Imogen Sara Smith, in a 2018 appreciation of Thelma Ritter, she wrote that Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) is “a movie about marginal people, in which—on the face of it—America is saved from communist espionage by a petty thief, a tramp, and a mercenary police informant. The star is Richard Widmark, irresistibly raffish as the pickpocket Skip McCoy, but Ritter shows him a thing or two about larceny, filching the movie out from under his nose.”