Femme fatales.
Pessimistic PIs.
A world of slippery shadows and smoke-filled back rooms in which dirty deeds and dastardly double crosses are planned.
We know what a film noir flick looks like, but what exactly is it? A genre? A style? A gimmick?
According to famed cinema scholar Roger Ebert, film noir is a “French term meaning ‘black film,’ or film of the night, inspired by the ‘Series Noir,’ a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.”
It is also, he said, the “most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.”
The Bainbridge Island Museum of Art is inviting film buffs to ring in the new year with a hefty helping of some of that classic American pessimism with the latest smARTfilm series: Film noir.
It is the second smARTfilm series to focus on this “most American film genre,” the first having been screened in September last year. This year’s series offers six new titles — “M” (1931), “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943), “The Big Sleep” (1946), “The Third Man” (1949), “The Night of the Hunter” (1955) and “Touch of Evil” (1958) — that run the gamut from early genre gems to classics from the golden age of the aesthetic, to be screened on successive Tuesdays beginning Jan. 17.
Tickets, $10 for each film and $50 for all six, are available now via www.brownpap ertickets.com. Visit www.biartmuseum.org for more information. Students can get free admission with prior registration. The auditorium opens at 7 and all movies start at 7:30 p.m.
Come early and make a night of it with dinner in the Bistro. Dinner seating starts at 5:30 p.m. Reservations are recommended and dinner is not included in the ticket price. Call 206-451-4011 to save a spot.
A closer look at the series offerings:
Jan. 17, “M”: Directed by Fritz Lang, this film stars Peter Lorre as a child murderer in an unnamed 1930s German city who is hunted by the angry denizens of the urban underworld, who are tired of the increased attention from the authorities, after the police fail to apprehend him.
Jan. 24, “Shadow of a Doubt”: Starring frequent Orson Welles collaborator Joseph Cotten, this Alfred Hitchcock thriller tells the story of an idealistic young girl (Teresa Wright) who becomes convinced her seemingly perfect Horatio Alger-esque visiting uncle (Cotton) is a murdering psychopath.
Jan. 31, “The Big Sleep”: Bogey and Bacall are back at it again in this Howard Hawks’ movie written by William Faulkner (based on the Raymond Chandler novel, the first to feature his famous Philip Marlowe character). In a typically crazy Chandler plot, Marlowe (Bogart) a hardboiled private eye, is hired by a rich family to handle a touchy blackmail situation.
Feb. 7, “The Third Man”: Based on the novella by Graham Greene (who also wrote the screenplay), this Carol Reed flick stars Cotten and Welles. Set in post-war Vienna, the movie follows Holly Martins (Cotten), an American who is given a job by his friend Harry Lime (Welles), but when he arrives finds his friend is dead. He then meets with Lime’s acquaintances in an attempt to investigate the suspicious death and discovers nothing is what it seems.
Feb. 14, “The Night of the Hunter”: The one. The only. Not to be missed. Robert Mitchum stars as a greedy psuedo-preacher who marries a gullible widow (Shelley Winters) whose young children are reluctant to tell him where their real daddy hid the $10,000 he’d stolen in a robbery.
Feb. 21, “Touch of Evil”: This tale of a murder investigation in a Southwestern border town pits Mexican narcotics officer Ramon Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) and his new American bride Susan (Janet Leigh) against a bitter, racist U.S. detective (Welles), who is determined to pin the rap on an innocent Mexican.
