For the Love of Film (Noir): Let the Links Begin

On Wednesday, the New York Times editorial page recognizes our efforts on behalf of The Film Noir Foundation. Note the construction--"a number of film bloggers." That's everyone here. Eddie, and the Siren, and Marilyn, and Greg, applaud you all.

And since the Times was good enough to mention Greg's flat-out gorgeous Maltese Falcon donation button, the Siren is moving it right up here. And she hopes many more people use it. Onward!



And thick and and fast they came at last, and more, and more, and more…

Scroll down for the links to the participants in the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon.

It was at the French cinema, under summer light, that the expression "film noir" came to be. In July 1946, the lottery of "les années eblouissantes" introduced, simultaneously and out of order, several American movies released at different times: Laura (1944), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Double Indemnity (1943) and The Woman in the Window (1944). These movies all told a story of crime, but did so in a new, dark and harsh way. And more importantly, there was neither sentimentality nor morality. The influence of certain 1930s novelists, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Raymond Chandler, was plain. Nino Frank, who charmed us with his Latin accent, the extent of his culture and his lightheartedness, told us when he published his article in August 1946: "Now, that's film noir."

(translation via kindness of the Siren's in-house service)

In their book Les Années Eblouissantes (The Dazzling Years), film director Jean-Charles Tacchella and journalist Roger Therond described their filmgoing in the years immediately following the Occupation. All the American movies they had missed during the years of the war began to flood Paris, and they were, as they say, dazzled. Naturally their book contains a large section on film noir, and their delight and fascination with it. It's hard even to imagine the impact--years of cinematic famine followed by this feast, trends and themes and techniques snapping into focus for Tacchella and Therond as they sat through film after film.

The Siren has always happily described herself as an evangelist--but only for our great film heritage. And with movies, she's always been able to summon an optimism she doesn't really have for most other things. Maybe nothing could be quite like seeing those five movies in a Paris cinema, in 1946, in the space of less than a month. But even in 2011, discovering a great film noir, and then another, and another, and another, must rank with the biggest thrills of a cinephile's life.

This week's blogathon, as Eddie Muller spells out in his interview below, gives us a chance to make sure that experience can continue for those who come after us. Of all the passionate things he has to say, this leaped out at the Siren:

It’s also important to understand that restoring a film isn’t merely about posterity. It can give a film new life, and in some cases led to a reassessment of an artist’s work, and a very valuable sense of cultural completion. I think of some of these missing titles as “ghost films,” and when we restore them we are actually bringing them back to life.

"There's no such thing as an old movie," Lauren Bacall once told Robert Osborne. "If you haven't seen it, it's new." Miss Bacall--who could tell us all a few things about film noir--is a wise woman. There's a lot that has been lost, but a lot still waiting to be returned to its former glory--The Sound of Fury is one.

That's why the Siren is firing up her credit card today to make her own donation. So is her esteemed blogathon partner Marilyn Ferdinand, whose own post and links collection (complete with a photo of us in a car--no really, that's us, we were going to the mall) can be found here. We hope you donate as well.

And so do the writers who are contributing their intelligence, their time and their energy to this week's blogathon.

Please join us in donating to the Film Noir Foundation.

For those participating, should you want a spiffy donation button like the one above, and really, why wouldn't you, slink over to Greg Ferrara's place and download one.

Let the linking begin, and bless you all!

Thursday, February 17

It is no secret to anyone who his blog The New York Post that critic Lou Lumenick is a serious old-movie hound, one who can play “stump the Siren” and usually win. Here he is with Street of Chance, a B-noir from Paramount that’s “in serious need of TLC.”

“I admire his loyalty in working with [Cy] Endfield again — he must have known that his previous work for the director was his very best”: David Cairns on The Limping Man, the film Lloyd Bridges and Cy Enfield made after The Sound of Fury.

Glenn Kenny has a brilliant post up about the noir side of uber-nerd Tommy Noonan, and how Richard Fleischer’s brilliant Cinemascope, Technicolor Violent Saturday let him “wed nerdy to dirty.”

Kim Morgan at MSN’s The Hit List has another dose of Barbara Stanwyck for us all to savor: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, a deep personal favorite of the Siren's.

Korea’s Kim Ji-woon “is something of a visual virtuoso,” says Peter Nelhaus, in discussing Kim's noir, A Bittersweet Life, which certainly looks gorgeous in the screen grabs.

Dennis Cozzalio, so dear to the Siren’s heart, has a highly entertaining post with pictures of movie marquees and newspaper ads, at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.

Hilary Barta summarizes one of the Siren’s favorite noirs, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, in five lines at Limerwrecks.

Wit, raconteur, bard of the underrated Burt Reynolds and proud Floridian Larry Aydlette shows us the real-life Florida locations for Body Heat.

At AV Preserve, Joshua Ranger contemplates noir as the omnivore’s dilemma.

"Is the Psychological Western just film noir on horseback?" asks Toby Roan of the fine film blog 50 Westerns from the 50s.

Bright Lights After Dark is one of the best film blogs around, and today C. Jerry Kutner makes a case for Mervyn Le Roy's Two Seconds as the first film noir. To what year would that date the birth of noir? 1932.

Ed Howard points out that the asphalt-tough Born to Kill contains a classic women's picture choice in men: safe and dreary, or dangerous and exciting? The noir element comes when you make Mr. Dangerous an actual psychopath...

"RHUMBAS! ROMANCE! RACKETS! A PRC Mystery With Music," was the tagline for Edgar Ulmer's Club Havana, and Doug Bonner goes in-depth at Boiling Sand.

Thinking of noir at Javabean Rush, and most of all thinking of--guess what?

Wonders in the Dark lists the Top 10 Characteristics of Noir, complete with luscious vintage posters.

“He’s a wonderful pure pathological study. A psychopath with no inhibitions": At Edward Copeland on Film, J.D. looks at Don Siegel's tidy procedural, The Line-Up.

At the U.S. Intellectual History blog, Tim Lacy examines Touch of Evil for what it says about America in the 1950s, and says our blogathon may lead to noir making an unscheduled appearance in his classroom...

Trish, a familiar name in the Siren's comments section, has a shiny new blog, a shiny new post, on Tension, and the pertinent question: "Even in the best film noir, isn't there always a moment when you ask yourself 'what the hell is going on?'"

Noir on Blu-Ray: Sean Axmaker of MSN Videodrone continues his tireless efforts for the blogathon with an article about the new release of Kansas City Confidential.

At The M0vie Blog, Darren Mooney is back with the most neo of all neonoirs, Blade Runner, as well as Dark City (The Director’s Cut)--AND a philosophical post, "Why Sci-Fi is Better Hardboiled."

Vince Keenan has another dispatch from Noir City Northwest, including a film the Siren adores, Jean Renoir's The Woman on the Beach.

Do you love Lee Remick as the Siren does? Click on Bill Wren at Piddleville. You'll thank me, gentlemen.

More roots of noir at Hollywood Revue: Asphalt--from 1929. Top that, C. Jerry.

If it has a happy ending, is it still noir? Sure, says Pamela L. Kerpuis at Scarlett Cinema, and here's two films to prove it.

And if it's animated, is it still noir? You betcha, says David Robson at House of Sparrows.

Another essay from the Parallax View's archives: Richard T. Jameson on Marilyn Ferdinand's favorite noir, Gun Crazy.

Rob at Starts Thursday is back with a great colored slide for The Woman in the Window.

"The end of noir as we know it": At TribecaFilm.com, Peter Gutierrez takes a look at Taxi Driver, which turns 35 years old this month.

In today's episode, Lee Price asks whether mom June is The Seventh Victim--and talks about the value of film preservation at Preserving the Family Collection.

And Donna of Strictly Vintage Hollywood gives us some ravishing costars and ravishing posters.

Finally, what's neo-noir got that classic noir doesn't? Nothing, the Siren was about to snap--until Dan Callahan, who loves old movies like she does, came along to remind her. Oh, that.

Wednesday, February 16

The mighty James Wolcott, ardent supporter of last year's blogathon and a longtime friend to this blog, talks about the beautiful noir forerunner City Streets, and lends his sonorous voice (and a donation, too) to the blogathon. Thanks, Mr. Wolcott.

Kim Morgan's shimmering Nightfall essay, part of her fabulously generous daily efforts on behalf of this blogathon and the genre she writes about so well, has been cross-posted at the Huffington Post. And her Barbara Stanwyck marathon at her MSN Hit List blog, which the Siren has been rushing to every day like it's Christmas morning, continues with a post about a film starring Babs, "the great, underrated Barry Sullivan" AND "ohhhh…Ralph Meeker!"

Is it not enough to read about film noir? Are you yearning to truly step into one, as long as you don't have to take the rap? At his Scanners blog, Jim Emerson of the Sun-Times invites you into The Dark Room. Sui generis, and amazing fun.

Poor Ralph Bellamy, did he ever get the girl? Well, he got the noir at least once, as well as a "spectacular line in dollarbook Freud." David Cairns, ladies and gentlemen.

The roots of film noir? Two words, one name: Dashiell Hammett. From Joe Thompson, of The Pneumatic Rolling Sphere Carrier Delusion.

Because sleuthing is too a feminine art: Film programmer extraordinaire Miriam Bale looks at Lady Sleuths, and Manhattan as a Mystery, at her blog The Nibbler: Tidbits and Tangents.

Down Argentine way (or with Argentine curators, anyway), via Michael Guillen at The Evening Class, more adventures in film preservation with our fearless leader Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation--and Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

"I firmly believe in noir as a genre, despite what Paul Schrader might think": Michael Phllips, aka Goatdog, aka blogger the Siren has loved for yonks, throws down the gauntlet and tackles the noir-or-not-noir question via a look at Tomorrow Is Another Day.

Paul Etcheverry of Way Too Damn Lazy to Write a Blog has a clip-laden post that includes some ravishing Duke Ellington.

"The 1943 film The Seventh Victim saw producer Val Lewton take the psychological horror that he had pioneered in the classic Cat People, and add a noirish feel": Rob Wickings of Excuses and Half Truths argues for the great producer/auteur's place in the noir pantheon.

Lee Price's parents, June and Art, wonder if someone has got The Wrong Man. And a meditation on film noir, German Expressionism, and lost films, at Preserving a Family Collection.

Toward "a common style construction of the femme fatale," using two of the greatest of all, from Meredith at Or Maybe Eisenstein Should Just Relax.

At Drew's place, The Blue Vial, an in-depth look at The Big Clock. The first set of screencaps alone make this one worth the click.

"It is obvious that he wanted his American debut to be a film that meant something": Ed Howard is back with a look at Fritz Lang's Fury.


Edward Copeland didn't love The Woman in the Window like the Siren did, but he's back today with another Fritz he does love: Scarlet Street. And he adds Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, the film that Scarlet Street remade—complete with a chart so you can keep track of the characters across movies.

An old comrade from last year's blogathon, Marc Heuck of The Projector Has Been Drinking, points out that film noir's influence extends to all sorts of places we may not have thought about--such as, for example, music videos.

"A genuinely evolved noir film": Roderick Heath, Marilyn’s estimable partner at Ferdy on Films, on Michael Mann’s Miami Vice.

Ariel Schudson at Sinamatic Salve-ation is back to discuss Electra Glide in Blue, “a film about fetishes and fetishizing.” And, for added kink, Robert Blake.

“He was hardboiled reading the newspaper,” remarked a Siren commenter once about Charles McGraw, and that made him a noir icon. John Greco eyeballs the actor, from a safe distance, at Twenty Four Frames in a post about Roadblock.

More vintage newspaper ads from WB Kelso of Scenes from the Morgue: Retro-Pulp Movie Ads, this time on Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal. The incongruous lower part of the bill cracks the Siren up.

At The M0vie Blog, Darren Mooney writes up Black Swan, which the Siren will allow has at least as much to do with noir as it does with ballerinas, and what Marilyn calls “the original and inventive Brick.”

Cornell Woolrich "is one of those writers...who never seems to show up at used bookstores. People don't part with his books." And for good reason. Christianne Benedict at Krell Laboratories on a Woolrich film adaptation, No Man of Her Own.

Another Limerwreck from Hilary Barta, this one on Phantom Lady. The Siren is gobbling these like potato chips.

At These Amazing Shadows, Kurt Norton tells of his personal connection to one of the greatest of all noirs, Out of the Past.

Bill Ryan of The Kind of Face You Hate links two movies, City of Fear and Panic in the Streets, as “plague noir”—men carrying literal death with them. Can’t get more noir than that.

When Arthur Penn died recently, film bloggers mentioned one movie again and again as a favorite: Night Moves. Susan Doll of Facets Features examines the late director's unique approach to neonoir.

Kevin Olson of Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies finds a little optimism—and an eye-popping collection of beautiful stills—in Force of Evil. How the Siren does love John Garfield…

“Detour: Closing Down the Open Road”: an article by David Coursen on Edgar Ulmer’s masterpiece, posted on Parallax View.

Sean Axmaker looks at how Anthony Mann gave us The Black Book and The Tall Target, working “with impoverished budgets but an extraordinary cinematographer, John Alton.” On MSN Movies Videodrone.

The Coen Brothers’ extraordinary debut, Blood Simple, gets a loving look from Jacqueline Fitzgerald at the Film Noir Blonde.

"A field day for de Havilland": More from Vince Keenan at Noir City Northwest, on The Dark Mirror and Crack-up.



Tuesday, February 15

The one and only Leonard Maltin has issued a preservation call to arms and name-checked our blogathon at his site, for which we are most grateful. So has Jim Emerson, that gentleman and scholar, at his very fine Scanners blog at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Because what every blogathon needs is a chicks-in-jail movie: David Cairns unlocks day two with Women's Prison, which boasts Ida Lupino in rare sadistic mode, as well as Jan Sterling, who makes a movie that much tougher just by showing up.


Dario Loren posts about Road House, a movie that the Siren loves to pieces. And Dario knows how to butter up the Siren, with kind words for Jean Negulesco, a director she's been touting for quite some time.

Only the best at Only the Cinema: Ed Howard is back with a searching look at Edmund Goulding's towering Nightmare Alley. Oh Tyrone my love, if only they'd let you do more like that one…

Vince Keenan checks in from Noir City once more, with a post about The Hunted, and also Angel Face, the Preminger noir that boasts an exceptionally fatale femme played by Siren darling Jean Simmons. What she went through to make that movie, but oh the movie they made…

Treasured Siren regular Vanwall Green always has an original insight, and his post at Vanwall Land, on the noir influence in Westerns, is no exception. He makes a case--and a damn fine one, at that--for John Ford's eternal Stagecoach as a noir.

Our worldwide reach expands to a Spanish-language post from Jaime Grijalba of Exodus 8:2, on The Great Flammarion, an Anthony Mann the Siren hasn't caught yet. Gloria Porta, where are you?

More cross-ocean noir love, from Michael C. at Cinema Ramble. This Australian loves the New York feel of Allen Baron's Blast of Silence: "Greasy food, mouldy apartments, early morning air." Visited our fair city before, haven't you Michael?

At Sinephile Salve-ation, Ariel Schudson talks about seeing This Gun for Hire and The Glass Key at the New Beverly--one of the few Los Angeles perks that can make a hardcore New Yorker hardcore jealous--and the strong influence the latter film had on the Coen brothers' great Miller's Crossing.

Beth Ann Gallagher of Spellbound meditates on Christmas Holiday, a movie that demonstrates why home for the holidays is as noir as it gets.

WB Kelso at Scenes from the Morgue: Retro-Pop Movie Ads shows us what ad campaigns used to look like with a fabulous set of newspaper ads for The Blue Dahlia.

Bill Wren of Piddleville on I Wake Up Screaming: "This should not be a good movie…[but] somehow it manages to be a good movie. How does that happen?" His answer, in part: Betty Grable. To which the Siren responds, amen!

Lee Price has his own charming take on I Wake Up Screaming at June and Art.

Darren Mooney is well into the land of neo-noir at the m0vie blog, with Se7en (seen it) L.A. Confidential (seen that too, HA) and Heat (see-whoops. Getting to it).

Peter Nellhaus is back, with a look at "film noir's younger, colorful, and sometimes flamboyant sibling, giallo." The film: Le Orme (Footprints).

Just click on all of Hilary Barta's limericks. You'll thank us. “Maltese Falcon Crest” at Limerwrecks. It's a hoot.

And because if you've had enough of The Maltese Falcon, you've had enough of life, sex and chocolate too, Donna Hill returns with a poster-rich post on that dreamy movie.

Edward Copeland, are you trying to get the Siren's attention with that post title, you sly puss? You didn't have to; you had her at Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window.

Great noir cinematographers. Screen caps. Oh my stars this post is heaven. Mat Viola at Notes of a Film Fanatic.

"For Polonsky, the real crimes aren’t just muggings and murders, but all the backroom arrangements made by amoral bureaucrats with more concern for statistics and legal loopholes than all the lives they’re ruining.": Andreas at Pussy Goes Grrr, on Force of Evil, the one masterpiece Abraham Polonsky ever got a chance to direct in his prime.

"A paranoid murder thriller that, for all of its budgetary constraints, took viewers on a spiral of justified paranoia": Sean Axmaker goes deeper into Stranger on the Third Floor at Parallax View.

"The now famous blond wig, a sexy, cynical smirk and (dear God!) that anklet": From her best-in-the-house table at MSN Movies, The Hit List, noir maven Kim Morgan gives us more Barbara Stanwyck to love with a post on the great lady in Double Indemnity.

Marya knows it's Oscar season--so how has film noir fared over the years? She fills us in, at Cinema Fanatic.

Ah, the Siren had forgotten this line: “We didn’t exactly believe your story, Miss O’Shaughnessy. We believed your 200 dollars. I mean, you paid us more than if you had been telling us the truth, and enough more to make it all right.” Retro Hound jogs her memory.


Sean Axmaker puts on his MSN Movies Videodrone fedora, snaps the brim and eyes Phil Karlson, the "the toughest of the film noir directors," and the one he touts as Karlson's best, 99 River Street.

Vince Keenan has another bulletin from Noir City Northwest, in which he discusses whether we can say that George Cukor made a film noir.

Filmmaker Kurt Norton, whose These Amazing Shadows documentary includes a great deal of information about how nitrate movies are preserved, writes up another one to keep: goddess Ida Lupino's The Hitch-hiker.

"Noir made Mitchum vulnerable. Made Lupino belong. Made Widmark set for life.": A wonderful personal meditation on noir, and why sometimes even Grandma doesn't get it. From Becca at Germans Like Heavy Makeup, subtitled "A Blog About Eyeliner and Old Cinema. (But Mostly Old Cinema)." Becca, the Siren claims you as a kindred spirit this minute.


Monday, February 14

Critic David Ehrenstein, beloved to all those who comment here at the Siren's place, argues at Fablog that there are TWO great versions of M. And one of them is Joseph Losey's.

There is no more eloquent and consistent advocate for the great cinema of the past than Dave Kehr, from his perch at the New York Times. Last week at his blog he wrote about the Film Noir Foundation's restoration of The Prowler, and included warm praise for the aims of the blogathon, as well as the donation link. We're very grateful.

Sean Axmaker also began promoting the blogathon at MSN Movies last week, and also at his blog Parallax View.

Dr. Morbius of Krell Laboratories uses strikingly gorgeous screen shots to point out the visual similarities between Out of the Past and the Robert Wise Western that also starred Mitchum, Blood on the Moon--noir's visual vocabulary carrying over to another genre.

"Film noir is not a genre," wrote Paul Schrader in 1972, but wait up a minute, sunshine, says Greg Ferrara. He grapples with the Schrader essay and the whole issue of defining film noir at his place.

Craig Simpson also cites Schrader, then uses him as a jumping-off point to explore the literary antecedents of Freaks and Gun Crazy, at The Man From Porlock.

Vince Keenan talks about the Noir City Northwest Festival and its screenings of High Wall, preserved via the Film Noir Foundation, and Stranger on the Third Floor, which of course stars another Siren obsession, the great Peter Lorre. Then he swings into They Won't Believe Me, in which Robert Young fools around with Jane Greer (the Siren believes that--who wouldn't fool around with Jane Greer?) and Don't Bother to Knock, the Siren's choice for best outing of the very young Norma Jean.

Mr. K of Mr. K's Greek Cornucopia endeared himself to the Siren with his blog tagline, "through the lens of an over-intellectual Southern transplant" (but we're fun, aren't we?) and by writing about Fritz Lang (and Bertholt Brecht) via Hangmen Also Die.

Darren Mooney at m0vie.com begins an epic blogathon marathon with "Noir Battle to the Strong: Why I'm Afraid of Classic Cinema." Because it bites, and once those jaws close on your neck...no, seriously, a thoughtful introduction to a series of posts on neo-noir.

Peter Nelhaus, who's seen everything and was a friend to this blog when even my mother didn't read it (though in all fairness to Mom, it took me a while to send her the link), posts about Black Silk, sometimes called the first Thai film noir, and why it reminds him of I Wake Up Screaming.

Bob Fergusson's Allure, dedicated to actresses both iconic and unjustly forgotten, is one of the Siren's favorite blogs. Here he posts some great shots of shady noir dames, and the lines spoken by and about them.

"The stuff of film noir. Bad mistakes. Getting trapped. Disillusionment. No way out": Jacqueline T. Lynch at Another Old Movie Blog smokes out The Prowler, the great Joseph Losey noir that was the Film Noir Foundation's last big restoration effort.

The nature of pulp, Frank Tuttle's direction, Veronica Lake's beauty, Alan Ladd and that cat: Bill Wren at Piddleville muses on This Gun for Hire.

One of the toughest noirs, from one of the toughest and greatest directors: Ed Howard of the highly discerning blog Only the Cinema posts about Fritz Lang's The Big Heat.

The Philippine cinema's greatest friend and a longtime pal to the Siren, Noel Vera, boosts the international quotient even further with a post about star Nora Aunor in the drama: 'Merika, and two noirs: Condemned and Bulaklak City Jail.

Nomad Widescreen paisano and another old friend, Tony Dayoub of Cinema Viewfinder, posts about institutional racism as seen in John Sturges' Mystery Street. (The Siren's favorite role for the late Ricardo Montalban, by the by. Yes, of course more than Khan.)

Tinky Weisblat is back! With a post that stole the Siren's heart, about Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, why she's the most sympathetic thing in the film and a soon-to-be-deathless character summary of Betty: "Anybody can be 22." All this, and a recipe for icebox cake. Bliss.

People who know their classic-film blogs know that John McElwee's Greenbriar Picture Shows is a must. John adorns each post with images available nowhere else, culled from his own vast collection. His contribution concerns one of the Siren's very favorite noirs, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.

Ben Alpers of the U.S. Intellectual History blog posts an in-depth look at the role of noir in cultural history. With a great opening in which he describes what happens when he asks American students to write, cold, about what they think of film noir. (The results of doing that are, for once, not depressing at all.)

Film critic Betty Jo Tucker rejoices in a name that would make a great noir character right there--probably a seductive diner waitress who lifts some poor chump's wallet. She chips in at Memosiac with a review of Charles Pappas' It's a Bitter Little World, a collection of great quotes from this most quotable of genres.

Lee Price brings it back to the original audience with a post at his blog June and Art, dedicated to the letters his parents exchanged. In "Dark Side of Town," Lee speculates about which noirs they might have seen. Cross-posted at his Preserving a Family Collection blog.

Hilary Barta (Surlyh to the Siren regulars who know and love him) will be contributing limericks all week long. First up: Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Funds, about guess which classic? And of course, a summary of why you should donate that manages to say it all in five rhymed lines.

David Cairns' Shadowplay is an unquestionably great film site, one that frequently leaves the Siren gnawing her hanky in sheer envy. David has intellect, film knowledge and insight to burn, but does he ever get stuffy? Judge by the title of his post on Brute Force: "Hume and Desire."

"Don't you ever consider your own fate?" "Not really." John Weagly at Captain Spaulding on Skull Island shows there's more than one way to post about noir with a short play, Orville and Wilbur Discuss Film Noir.

Two excellent posts at Parallax View written by Richard T. Jameson: “Film Noir: An Introduction” and “When Noir Was Noir.” The anecdote about translating the title of Jean Renoir's The Southerner will cause much merriment in the Siren's bilingual household.

Over at MSN Videodrome, Sean Axmaker begins his noir-analysis posts with Stranger on the Third Floor, starring Peter Lorre, whom as you know the Siren loves dearly. Was this the first film noir?

Steve-O at Noir of the Week, the premier noir site on the Web, also interviewed Eddie Muller, and Eddie had a great deal more to say.

The magnificent faces of noir, via Donna Hill of Strictly Vintage Hollywood. So beautiful the Siren bookmarked it.

Paula Vitaris turns her great screencapping chops to Nicholas Ray'sOn Dangerous Ground. The shot of the suspect Robert Ryan beats up is particularly awesome.

Bill Ryan of The Kind of Face You Hate comes through for the blogathon with a post about Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall, with a particular focus on the city/country split in this beauteous movie.

Laura of Laura's Misc. Musings tackles Rudolph Mate's great DOA, still one of the grimmest and most unusual plot conceits ever filmed.

Silver Screen Modiste, in keeping with our Valentine's Day kickoff, posts a stunning collection of screen couples from noir films, with observations on the art of the publicity shot.

The Derelict (aka smart, funny Jenny Baldwin) at Libertas collects her favorite foreign posters for American films noir. The Siren's favorite: an arrestingly beautiful black-and-white poster for Force of Evil that is also guaranteed to stop Kim Morgan's heart.

Victor Ozols gives the blogathon a charming, funny, thorough shoutout at BlackBook Magazine Online. (The Siren had to correct "shoutout" from her original "shootout"; this is getting to her.) Many, many thanks, Victor.

The incomparable Glenn Kenny of foo-foo film site supreme Some Came Running (and MSN Movies) writes up--well, the Siren can't do better than his title: "Ciao, Manhattan, or, the chocolate of reality gets into the peanut butter of fiction in Sweet Smell of Success." If you think you've read it all on that film, trust the Siren, you haven't.

Kim Morgan of Sunset Gun gets it. She gets everything, like the logic of starting a film noir blogathon on Valentine's Day: "the perfect day, really, since so much of film noir concerns an emotion that makes one moody, malicious and often, in the best cinematic scenarios, murderous." Her essay, as ever written in her phenomenal style: Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall.

Kim Morgan also has a perch at MSN Movies, at The Hit List. Over there, she'll be taking us through the week with Barbara Stanwyck, a lady who would get many votes for the greatest actress the American cinema ever had. The series starts with a "Wrong Number"...

"It Can Give a Film New Life": A Talk with Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation

One aspect of our film-preservation blogathons that I've loved is observing how it's possible to band together for this cause, without ever laying eyes on one another. I've never met my partners Marilyn Ferdinand or Greg Ferrara in person, although if I did, I feel certain I could spot them across a crowded room; Marilyn's energy would be creating a visible force field, and Greg's coolness would have anyone speaking to him exhaling frosted breath.

And so I haven't met Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation face to face, and yet I'm crazy about him. He has worked for years to promote the genre he loves, to bring it to more people and proselytize for its artistry and historical importance. Most of all, he's working to keep these films alive for the future.

A lot has changed about the ways in which we see movies, and it's well worth going back and taking another look at why we do what we do with the blogathon. To help us set out aims and principles, Eddie agreed to answer some questions that I posed to him via email.

Siren: Let's start by discussing the steps involved when the Film Noir Foundation decides to take on a project like The Sound of Fury, aka Try and Get Me. What materials and costs are needed to restore a film?

Muller: The first step in any restoration or preservation is locating the best available source material. You hope that it is “pre-print,” meaning that it’s original negative and soundtracks. If those elements are in good shape, that’s your best option for creating a new, pristine version of the film. When it comes to independently produced films, however, it’s difficult to find pre-print elements because the original owner is invariably out of business and the pre-print elements have most likely been lost. In a lot of cases, material gets left at the labs that originally printed the films, and when those go out of business or clean house they’ll deposit what they have at an archive like UCLA … that’s what happened with The Prowler. It wasn’t the negative, but it was a fine grain positive, from which UCLA was able to create a new negative. We’ll always be able to strike fresh prints now, if necessary.

Obviously, the cost varies depending on many factors: whether the film is black-and-white or color (we’re lucky with classic noir, as it’s less expensive to restore), the running time, the condition of the material you’re using to perform the restoration, the state of the soundtrack, all of it comes into play when estimating how much it costs to restore or preserve a film. The soundtrack is crucial; everyone always talks about image quality, but sound quality is absolutely as important. So it can vary, from a few thousand dollars to a hundred thousand dollars or more. Ask the Film Foundation about the bill for restoring The Red Shoes. Ouch.

Siren: What is the difference between preserving a film and a full-fledged restoration?

Muller: In a preservation project you are not improving or enhancing. You’re simply striking an archival print from the best available material. In 2010 we preserved three 35mm films owned by Warner Bros. that the studio did not have the resources to preserve. Frankly, WB owns so many films that there is no way it can preserve everything in 35mm … and it’s not the only studio faced with this. As films disappear or become debilitated past the point of safe projection (like, ironically, John Garfield’s The Breaking Point) there is no economic incentive for a studio to preserve the film as a film.

Two of the three titles we preserved, Loophole and The Hunted, are really obscure and for various reasons (most likely rights issues) will probably never be released by Warner. The studio had the original elements, but no print of either film. I felt both were significant: Loophole (1953) is a pertinent metaphorical commentary on the Communist witch-hunt (while still being fun) and The Hunted (1948), scripted by Steve Fisher, is an intriguing B film that subverts the genre’s femme fatale tropes. And it was the only one of Belita’s three films noir that seemed relegated to being “lost.” So with these two, it was clearly a rescue mission. These 35mm prints are likely the only way they’ll be seen for the foreseeable future.

If the original negative is in good condition (as these were), a preservation is fairly easy for us to finance. We’re typically able to make enough in a single NOIR CITY screening at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre to pay for the cost of a new print. That’s because we can sell out the 1,400-seat house. We can’t fund this work by showing in smaller venues. San Francisco is crucial to the crusade.



One of these three recent preservations, High Wall (1947), was already digitally transferred and available as a manufactured-on-demand DVD. But there was no longer a 35mm print of the film. We felt that it was a significant enough example of film noir that it merited being preserved in its original format. So we paid to strike a new print from the original negative, and that print will be archived at UCLA. It can be shown, with the permission of the Film Noir Foundation and rental payment to Warner Bros., in venues certified by the Federation of International Film Archives (FIAF). I really wanted to show that film at the last San Francisco NOIR CITY festival, where I always make a big deal out of screening films not available on DVD. Well, when I created the program High Wall wasn’t on DVD, but then it was added to the Warner Archive Collection because they had a digital master, probably from when it was shown on Turner Classic Movies. Regardless, High Wall is an important film in terms of how movies in the forties dealt with veterans’ issues, mental illness, etc. So I felt that it was essential it exist in the form it was created, and not just as a DVD.

Is that quixotic, or redundant? I don’t think so. Current digital technology may be obsolete within the next 20 years as the marketplace inexorably pushes for newer delivery systems. We cannot predict the future, and have little control over it. What we can do is protect what we know is valuable from our past. If you save a film in its original form, and preserve it, it doesn’t matter it the technology changes another 20 times…the film will always be there, available to future generations. (Along with preserving films, of course, we need to be preserving projectionists!)

When we do a restoration, it generally means no pre-print material exists. The goal is to create, from various sources, a new negative from which prints can be struck in perpetuity. These are more labor-intensive, long-range projects, where you have to really scour the earth for material. You don’t want to get in the middle of a restoration and then discover a decent negative of the film in an archive somewhere. We’re finally “cornering” Too Late for Tears after several years sourcing prints. We may have enough now to actually restore that film with confidence.

Siren: What's the ultimate goal of a Film Noir Foundation restoration project?

Eddie: To me, it’s two-fold: to ensure that films will exist for future generations as they were originally created—and, just as significantly for me, to respect the artists who created these films by refusing to let their work vanish or degenerate.

Siren: How does the foundation determine which films it will choose to restore?

Eddie: Well, it better be a good movie. I know that’s a little subjective from a pure preservationist’s perspective, but it’s the first thing I think of. Is it a good story? We also consider its historical significance. The Prowler, for example, was an obvious choice. A “lost” Losey film and one of his best; a script written by Dalton Trumbo during his blacklisting, produced (silently) by John Huston and Sam Spiegel, and its cachet as being a very smart and subversive film that had literally slipped through the cracks.

Much the same is true of The Sound of Fury, because of Cy Endfield’s blacklisting and the film’s pertinence to the hysteria of the anti-communist witch-hunt. But we have no agenda—Cry Danger and Too Late for Tears have no political significance at all. They’re simply terrific films, and that’s more than enough reason to preserve them. Bottom line, it’s not much more complicated than saying, “People need to see this!”

It’s also important to understand that restoring a film isn’t merely about posterity. It can give a film new life, and in some cases led to a reassessment of an artist’s work, and a very valuable sense of cultural completion. I think of some of these missing titles as “ghost films,” and when we restore them we are actually bringing them back to life.



Siren: Finally, let's talk about the availability of movies, versus their state of preservation. Recently, the number of once-rare movies available for streaming on the Internet has exploded. The Sound of Fury is itself available for download on Netflix Instant. Should that make us feel more sanguine about the condition of the films on offer?

Eddie: It’s an intriguing issue. New technology is fabulous for making otherwise hard-to-find films available for convenient viewing. For educational purposes it’s brilliant! Teachers can assign students to watch films that they’d never have access to otherwise, and it costs next to nothing. But is having access to a streaming version of a film, or even a DVD, the same as actually preserving it? Ask anyone who has seen any DVD or online version of Too Late for Tears if they feel those editions are sufficient. It’s like watching the film underwater. Think a DVD is a preservation copy of a film? Call me when it gets scratched. A film gets scratched and it still plays. Scratch a DVD, it’s kaput. Digital is also a wildly volatile medium. Ask any filmmaker who projects their work from a DVD—it looks different every time, depending on a myriad of factors. If you concede that having a digital version of the film is sufficient, then you run the risk of that film “deteriorating” as equipment suppliers push for newer and sharper ways of viewing a “film:” Dave Kehr last year wrote a crucial essay in the New York Times about how the trend toward high-definition imagery could actually hurt chances of older films ever making it to this new medium, because the obsession with image sharpness was creating a generation of viewers who could reject older films as inherently flawed if they didn’t translate well into hi-def.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not anti-digital. The cost of shooting film anymore is crazy; from an economic standpoint, I’m glad movie production has moved to digital, it makes sense. But films that were made as films should be preserved as films—it’s not that expensive to ensure it. Perhaps all of the films we restore will eventually be available digitally. That would be wonderful … but it won’t happen unless they are first restored as films. For me personally, and I know many others share this sentiment, digital does not replicate the glorious luster of light projected through celluloid. The digital image is flatter and less alive than a film image.

As far as I’m concerned—and a lot of other people will agree—motion pictures never looked better than they did in the mid-20th century, and they never will again. We should celebrate that by preserving those films in their original format. The filmmakers deserve that honor.

Siren: Thanks, Eddie.

Nomadic Existence: Excerpts from Nomad Widescreen's Retro Fit Column

The Siren’s Retro Fit column at Nomad Widescreen, the weekly online magazine edited by the estimable Glenn Kenny, continues apace. Nomad is pursuing a subscription-based model that it hopes will lead to the holy of holies, a Web-only outlet where writers are paid, fairly, for what they write.

That’s a way of saying that the Siren can’t link directly to her Nomad pieces, as that isn’t what Nomad is about. Free three-month trials are available here.; sign up and you can read the issues referenced here. The quarterly subscription rate is $6 for 12 issues, which doesn’t seem like a huge amount to pay for content that includes Karl Rozemeyer, Tony Dayoub of Cinema Viewfinder, Simon Abrams of Slant and elsewhere, and Vadim Rizov of Infinite Philistinism, Greencine and the most dryly humorous Twitter feed on the planet.

Still, the Siren thought her patient readers might like to see what she’s been up to, so excerpts from her last four columns follow.



From the Feb. 9 cover story, “God Save the Queens,” about The King’s Speech and royalty in the movies:

No sooner does someone make a narrative movie about historical events and people than someone else lines up to point out the omissions and errors in it. And so it has been with The King’s Speech, the movie about royalty that seems to have usurped The Social Network’s Oscar frontrunner status. Tom Hooper’s film concerns Britain’s George VI and his struggle to overcome a stutter that made public speaking an agony for him. And that subject matter has been a problem for those who believe that the movie should have been concerned with something else.

Christopher Hitchens, for example, wrote a piece for Slate that seemed to indicate a better movie would have attacked the cult of Churchill, because if you've read a lot of Hitchens, it's plain he thinks attacking the cult of Churchill would make just about anything better, possibly even True Grit. A better movie would also have brought up the king’s support for arch-appeaser Neville Chamberlain and slammed Edward VIII even harder than it did.

Hitchens’s argument stems from the sincere, and laudable, belief that history matters, that what people believe to be history matters, and that movies that propagate comfortable lies can be pernicious. Movies about royalty present a particularly irksome problem for an anti-royalist like Hitchens. Down the decades, these films take much of their appeal from humanizing royals, making them more like us, or what we imagine we might be if we held the reins of power and recognized everyone by the backs of their heads, because they were constantly bowing to us.

From the Feb. 2 Retro Fit column, “The Ballad of Linda Darnell”:

...There is something girlish to the way Darnell played all her bad-dame parts. My Darling Clementine (1946) cast her as lovelorn Chihuahua, who wasn’t bad at all, not really even misunderstood. John Ford reportedly didn’t want Darnell for the part, but his lingering close-up of her dying face is as tender as anything in the movie. In Summer Storm (Douglas Sirk, 1944), she plays the character’s grasping nature as a petulant yearning for the shiny toys that Father Christmas never brought her. When all at once she behave in an unselfish manner, it seems the sort of whim this childlike temptress might indulge. She comes as close to pure evil as she ever did in Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945), in a movie that would make an interesting double bill with Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Darnell’s venomous Netta up against Joan Bennett as Lazy Legs. But Bennett doesn’t understand the danger from the men she’s playing and getting played by; Darnell looks at Laird Cregar with a nagging suspicion of his madness. On the other hand, she’s a completely clueless good girl in Preston Sturges’ great Unfaithfully Yours (1948); Daphne de Carter is a study in flummoxed, wounded sincerity. Any nagging doubts about Daphne are there only because, well, can woman who looks like that be trusted to remain faithful, particularly to a conductor who’s an almighty pain in the neck?

It was 1949’s A Letter to Three Wives that marked her pinnacle. The character of Lora May fit her like no other, and given Joseph Mankiewicz’s writing and facility with directing actors, Darnell shone, the sharpest, funniest thing in a very funny movie. (She may have gotten some extra help, as she was having an affair with Mankiewicz during and after filming.) Many people call Lora May a gold-digger, but that she is not. Lora May wants out of the “Finney mansion on the tracks,” sure, but what the character wants even more is respect, and respectability. Porter Hollingsway (Paul Douglas, never better) honks his car horn for her to come out of the house, like he’s delivering Chinese take-out, and Darnell stands by the sink without so much as shifting her legs, until he comes to the door to escort her. Porter pulls up the car to the house after their date, and Darnell gives one micro-glance at the door, her face cool and lovely though you know she’s counting out the beats that will force him to get out and open it for her. She cares about manners, she cares about form, because they will signal that Porter knows she has what he really wants: class.

From the Jan. 26 column, “Snowbound: Great Vintage Movie Depictions of the Dead of Winter”:

1. Way Down East (D.W. Griffith, 1920). There are plenty of sun-dappled meadows and flowers when poor Lillian Gish is being seduced by Lowell Sherman, but the last twenty minutes or so of D.W. Griffith’s movie may constitute the greatest winter sequence of all time. The snow swirling as Gish is cast out by the Squire, her hopeless, heartbroken wanderings in the storm--the Idiot With a Tripod short was lovely, but this blizzard is the real, life-threatening deal. When icicles formed on Gish’s eyelashes, Griffith ordered cinematographer Billy Bitzer to move in for a closeup. Bitzer responded, “I will, if the oil doesn’t freeze in the camera!” The scene where Gish’s hand trails in the water of the frozen river was her own idea, and she ruefully admitted that her hand ached in cold weather for the rest of her life.

2. Track of the Cat (1954). William Wellman’s eccentric thriller, with Robert Mitchum and the ever-marvelous Teresa Wright. Wellman complained that he had made the movie as an experiment in filming color to look like black and white, with the snowy landscapes leeched of all but the smallest splashes of brightness--and no one appreciated it. Perhaps that was true at the time of release, but viewing this movie more than 60 years later, the beauty of the palette is the first thing you notice. Appearances by the killer panther of the title are handled in a way that’s reminiscent of Cat People. A boldly austere movie that well deserves a revisit.

From the Jan. 5 column, “Check It and See,” about Nicholas Ray’s fevered, fascinating Hot Blood:

So Wilde and Russell can’t dance, and they don’t look like they can dance, and yet the plot hinges on their dancing, and it is a problem, and yet not a problem. One of the most memorable scenes in Hot Blood consists of a whip dance Wilde and Russell perform at their arranged-yet-unplanned wedding, in which Wilde literally whips off pieces Russell’s clothing. Except, in full-length shots the dancers are obviously neither Wilde nor Russell, and the skirt-down close-ups of Russell’s whirling legs reveal gams that look nothing like hers. And it’s typical of the way the movie sometimes turns weirdness into a virtue that the obvious doubles sort of fit. The world created is so bizarre that it’s a plausible notion, this concept that at Gypsy weddings and other festive occasions, dancing doppelgangers appear from nowhere to do all the hard stuff.

When Hot Blood was screened in 1985 at a retrospective honoring her, Jane Russell described it (affectionately) as one of those “Gypsy stories where the characters have passionate, boiling blood and there's scratching and clawing and grabbing and a lot of shouting.” Loudest of all is the color scheme. It is difficult to think of another movie that contains so many variations on red and its offspring--salmon, fuschia, orange. The palette is exhausting, like a meal that’s all variations on chili pepper, but also quite beautiful. And then about fifteen minutes in, Wilde pulls up with his blonde girlfriend in a convertible so blaringly turquoise it’s the visual equivalent of the cannons in the 1812 Overture.

STICK ‘EM UP: A SHOW OF HANDS FOR BLOGATHON PARTICIPANTS

This is some crowd. With this kind of talent, the heist in The Asphalt Jungle would have gone a lot more smoothly. Keep 'em comin’.

Meanwhile, an important housekeeping note: the donation link for the Film Noir Foundation has been changed, to one that will be exclusive for donations made through the blogathon.

THIS IS THE NEW DONATION LINK!

If you have already donated, first of all bless your heart. Second of all, drop a line to me. I will pass your name on to the Film Noir Foundation, to make sure they know your contribution was blogathon-related, so's you'll eligible for the loot.

Is your name missing? Don’t send in the Chicago boys. Just jog the Siren’s memory, please. Edward G. Robinson was painting her toenails and she got distracted.

THE GANG SO FAR:

Leonard Maltin of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Crazy
Tony Dayoub of Cinema Viewfinder
Ed Howard of Only the Cinema
Patricia Schneider at The Lady Eve’s Reel Life
Vanwall Green at Vanwall’s Land
Sam Juliano of Wonders in the Dark
Joshua Ranger of AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Donna Hill at Strictly Vintage Hollywood
Ben Kenigsberg at Time Out Chicago
David Steece of Randomaniac
Beth Ann Gallagher at Spellbound
Peter Nellhaus at Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee
Jacqueline Fitzgerald of Film Noir Blonde
Bill Ryan at The Kind of Face You Hate
Betty Jo Tucker of Reel Talk Movie Reviews
R. D. Finch at The Movie Projector
Peter Gutierrez at Tribeca
Bob Fergusson at Allure
Steve-O at Film Noir of the Week and Back Alley Noir
Brian Darr at Hell on Frisco Bay
DeeDee at Darkness to Light
Hilary Barta at Limerwrecks
Hedwig Van Driel at As Cool as a Fruit Stand
Paula Vitaris at Paula’s Movie Page
Jacqueline T. Lynch at Another Old Movie Blog
Tinky Weisblat of In Our Grandmothers’ Kitchens
Doug Bonner at PostModern Joan
Kevin Olson at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies
Gareth at Gareth’s Movie Diary
Meredith of Or Maybe Eisenstein Should Just Relax
Java Bean Rush
John Greco of Twenty-Four Frames
Vince Keenan at VinceKeenan.com
Ivan G. Shreve of Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
Darren at The Movie Blog
Brandie of True Classics: The ABCs of Classic Film
Mat Viola of Notes of a Film Fanatic
Joe Thompson from The Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion
Bill Wren of Piddleville
Ms. Zebra of Germans Like Heavy Make-Up
Bryce Wilson of Things That Don’t Suck
Arthur S. at …this pig’s alley
Gautam Valluri of The Broken Projector
Christian Esquevin of Silver Screen Modiste
Caroline Shapiro at Garbo Laughs
Neil Sarver of The Bleeding Tree
John Weagly of Captain Spaulding on Skull Island
Hind Mezaina of The Culturist
Toby Roan of 50 Westerns from the 50s
David Cairns of Shadowplay
Craig Porlock of The Man from Porlock
Edward Copeland on Film
Laura of Laura’s Misc. Musings
Machelle Allman of Venetian Blond
Nicholas Pillai of Squeeze Gut Alley
Ben Alpers, Ray Haberski, David Sehat, Tim Lacy, and Andrew Hartman of the U.S. Intellectual History Blog
Adam Zanzie of Icebox Movies
Mr. K of Mr. K's Geek Cornucopia
Ryan Kelly of Medfly Quarantine
The Derelict, at both Libertas and Dereliction Row
Noel Vera of Critic After Dark
MIchael Cusdin of Cinema Ramble
Kristen Sales of Sales on Film
Trish of I Wake Up Screaming
Dr. Morbius of Krell Laboratories
Jaime Christley of Unexamined Essentials
Gordon D of Blog THIS, Pal!
Kurt Norton and Paul Mariano of These Amazing Shadows Blog
David Ehrenstein of Fablog
Kim Morgan of Sunset Gun
Glenn Kenny of Some Came Running
Lou Lumenick of the New York Post
Catherine Grant of Film Studies for Free
Jenny of Cinema OCD
Steve Santos of The Fine Cut

Andreas of Pussy Goes Grrr

Sheila O'Malley of The Sheila Variations

Glenn Kenny of Some Came Running

Carl DiNello of Hollywood Movie Memories

Rob Byrne of Starts Thursday!


And of course, wit and raconteur Greg Ferrara of Cinema Styles and my blogathon partner and general goddess/whirlwind of energy and organization, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, who did the bulk of compiling this list.



Finally, the Siren neglected to mention that she is, briefly, in a documentary that just premiered at Sundance. The film is called These Amazing Shadows, and it is a tribute to the National Film Registry, made by Kurt Norton and Paul Mariano. The Siren may be glimpsed talking about musicals, with regard to The Wizard of Oz, and what she has to say won’t surprise any of her readers. She was surprised, however, to find herself up there with a large number of well-known directors, actors and film writers. It’s a passionate ode to our film heritage, and has some wonderful detailed scenes of the mechanics of film restoration. Kurt and Paul, in other words, are on our side.

IFC bought the North American TV, VOD and DVD rights to These Amazing Shadows, the only documentary of five films called Sundance Selects. They are promoting it through video on demand through about Feb. 22. Details of the VOD availability are included in this IFC release. Trailer and clips can be viewed here.

For the Love of Film (Noir): Call for Posts

Zowie, a beautiful YouTube clip from the inimitable Greg Ferrara on the Siren’s blog. She doesn’t do clips very often. And look at the banner, with beauteous Joan Bennett getting her fatale-ism on with dear Fritz Lang, the Siren’s favorite autocrat.

Something’s afoot. Monocle-shopping? A boudoir interior-design rethink chez Siren? Valentine’s Day reservations, perhaps?

Better than that, way better. It is time for us to band together once more to do our bit for film preservation. Yes, it is the Call for Posts for (crescendo)

For the Love of Film (Noir)

The concept is simple. This year as last, the Siren and the great Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films are calling on bloggers to band together. Together we will urge people to donate in order to restore and preserve endangered film.

Donations this year go to the Film Noir Foundation, which marvelous organization, under the leadership of Eddie Muller, works to save movies in this beloved genre, movies from many eras and from many countries. Eddie is a gentleman, a wit and a scholar, a man with an incredible love for and dedication to film. Marilyn and I are proud to be helping the foundation to which he has devoted so much.

And this year, in a nifty plot twist, we know the film to be restored ahead of time--a fine and important noir called The Sound of Fury, aka Try and Get Me.

Fritz is gracing the banner for a reason; The Sound of Fury tells the same story as Lang’s celebrated 1936 Fury. Directed by Cy Endfield, who was fated to be blacklisted later on, The Sound of Fury stars Lloyd Bridges in as good a role as that fine actor ever got to play. When the Siren announced that this was the film to be restored, several of her distinguished, all-seeing commenters popped up to remark that they preferred this version to the Lang. As Marilyn noted before, when Lloyd’s sons--Jeff and Beau, you may have heard of them--saw the film, they were “blown away” by Lloyd’s performance. More from Marilyn:

A nitrate print of the film will be restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, using a reference print from Martin Scorsese’s personal collection to guide them and fill in any blanks. Paramount Pictures has agreed to help fund the restoration, but FNF is going to have to come up with significant funds to get the job done. That’s where we come in.

Our Facebook page is updated continuously with information about the blogathon, including ideas for posts, should you need any.

This year as last, we are offering raffle prizes to donors. The loot includes:

1. The brand-new deluxe DVD edition of The Prowler

2. A DVD documentary on Eddie Muller, The Czar of Noir, featuring his short film with Marsha Hunt, The Grand Inquisitor.

3. Illustrator Steve Brodner will be contributing a drawing of Lloyd Bridges as a raffle prize during the blogathon. Look in the photo album on the Facebook page for samples of his work.

4. A full set of all nine posters for the Film Noir Foundation’s NOIR CITY film festival, held each year in San Francisco since 2003.

5. A set of all three NOIR CITY SENTINEL annuals. Noir City is the Foundation’s flagship publication.

6. Programs from NOIR CITY 8 and 9

7. An autographed copy of Eddie Muller's first novel, The Distance.

Here are the Rules for Blogathon Participants, as elegantly simple as black-and-white:

1. Post on any topic related to film noir, at any time during the week of Feb. 14 through Feb. 21.

2. In your post, include the all-important donation link for the Film Noir Foundation.

3. Send the link to your post to Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films (http://www.ferdyonfilms.com; email ferdyonfilms@comcast.net) and to the Siren here (http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/ or via email, campaspe101@yahoo.com). We will be keeping track of the submissions and linking to them on our respective blogs.

4. Follow the links here and at Marilyn's site to read the contributions; remember too that nothing gladdens a blogger's heart like a nice comment.

And, most vital of all,

5. DONATE GENEROUSLY to the Film Noir Foundation, and urge your readers to do the same.

Our grand total last year was more than $30,000 in contributions and matching funds; those funds saved films through the National Film Preservation Foundation. One of the Siren’s great joys was seeing the spreadsheets and realizing that there were some large gifts, and also a great many people kicking in small donations, one after the other, until the numbers really began to add up. It all counts. It all helps.

This year, the Siren has received some queries about participation, and thought perhaps others might have similar concerns. Switch on the desk lamp, it's time for the Blogathon Q&A. If you have other questions, the Siren will be right here in comments.



1. I neglected to participate last year. I feel such torments of guilt, like Van Heflin in Act of Violence. Please, can I redeem myself by contributing a post this year?

We called off Robert Ryan. Come back. All is forgiven.

2. Can I post that week even if I don’t sign up now?

Sure, just let us know when you do.

3. I am a blogger based outside the U.S., and I would like to contribute a post.

Please do! We love the international character of the blogathon.

4. I love film and want to do my bit, but my blog is focused on food/mascara/politics etc. Can I still contribute?

Absolutely. To cite one example, last year Tinky Weisblat, at the time primarily a food blogger, did a wonderful post and included a recipe. Marilyn tried the recipe out and pronounced it delicious; the Siren was all set to cook it herself but then she ripped the lace on her apron and got depressed.

Anyway, the post itself should be about film noir, and the donation link should be there. If the topic of the post is “False Eyelashes in Film Noir,” that would be...completely awesome, actually. The Siren would read that. She might even post that herself.

5. I want to write about a new movie that I consider to be noir. Is that all right?

Knock yourself out, dollface. Although, if you are writing about a new movie because you secretly prefer new to old, for heaven’s sake don’t say so outright as the Siren will be deeply hurt.

6. I wrote a post a while back about film noir, and I don't like to brag, but it was great. This post got me a fan letter from my Cousin Millicent. It got me a date in a hot tub. It got me a paying critic job. Can I repost this inspired post for the blogathon?

All right, all right! If you haven't got anything shiny new we won't go all Veda Pierce on you. Please do freshen it up, however, with an appeal for donations and the all-important donation link.

Anyway, surely you get the general idea. This year as last, there is no obnoxious door policy at the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon. You may come as you are. And you don’t have to know what you will write about now; the promise to post is enough.

Tonight, the Siren plans to start updating this post with names of contributors, and Marilyn plans to do the same. Let us hear from you!

The Siren by Request: Village of the Damned (1960)

Greg Ferrara of Cinema Styles has an excellent post up about science fiction and his discontents, in which he defends, at length and with great wit, the notion that Star Wars isn’t science fiction. The Siren isn’t fully convinced--I mean, the blasters, and the hyperspace, and all those computers with the cunning little buttons--although, as she stated, she isn’t an aficionado. But the Siren recently was accused, in a couple of different forums, of uncritically thinking everything old is great, which peevish, unfounded nonsense caused her to tear her crinolines when she threw herself on the chesterfield in a fit of pique. So she is delighted to show herself gravitating toward relatively modern movies in this genre, while the fabulous Greg is over in his corner admitting he prefers older movies. The age of miracles hasn’t passed, as dear Ira Gershwin once wrote in a beautiful, and quite old, song. Onward.

Now that we take up Village of the Damned from 1960, (requested by Laura of Who Can Turn the World Off With Her Smile?) can we agree to agree on something beforehand? You can call it a science fiction movie, you can call it a horror movie, you can call it an allegory, but here at the Siren’s place, let’s face it, Village of the Damned is one thing above all: It’s a George Sanders movie. As such, it has several things that one expects, such as dry line deliveries, well-cut suits, occasional cocked eyebrows and George doing his secondary type of role, after all-around cad--that of somewhat effete intellectual.

It also has some things you don’t expect from Sanders, such as him going dewy over his wife’s announcement of a pregnancy, interaction with a child that doesn’t involve snapping (as Kim Morgan once suggested) “you’re too short for that gesture,” and most startling of all, Sanders fainting in his very first scene. A swoon from George Sanders, the King of Unflappable? It’s like confronting an opening in which Lee Marvin folds cloth napkins.

Village of the Damned, filmed in glorious black-and-white by DP Geoffrey Faithfull, is set in a bucolic, out-of-the-way English village, at first so postcardish you half-expect Margaret Rutherford to swing by on her bicycle, but later taking on a darker, dingier aspect. The opening has a great, fairy-tale hook, as Gordon Zellaby (our George) is on a phone call with his brother-in-law Alan (Michael Gwynn), a military officer, and suddenly faints dead away. But it isn’t just Gordon, it’s the whole village out cold. Eventually they come to, and things seem to return to normal. Except that suddenly, every woman in the village of childbearing age falls pregnant (a wonderful British idiom that suggests causes both active and passive).

In the course of a few short months, the women give birth at the same time, and before you know it, the kids are growing up at a decidedly inhuman pace. The children are all blonde, hyperintelligent and preternaturally adult. The authorities strongly suspect something is up and want to deal with the children en masse. But Sanders, a professor whose beautiful wife is one of the ones who’s given birth, is adamant that the children should be left alone so they can be observed. He even volunteers to teach the little darlings himself in a one-room schoolhouse, like some horror nerd’s idea of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. Leaving the creatures alone turns out to be as lousy an idea as it was in The Thing From Another World, if not quite as spectacularly ill-judged as in Alien.

Here’s something to ponder--why do scientists so frequently get it in the neck from science fiction? By which the Siren means, for example, movies where the man (or woman) of action looks at the alien and its dripping fangs and the way it’s casually fiddling with the radio buttons in order to scramble communications with the Air Force, and the man (or woman) of action sensibly suggests blasting the thing. But the scientist is all, “No, we have to study it! We need to make friends! Just hold out your hand and let him sniff it!” The Siren would attribute this theme to the Cold War anxiety that gives so much classic sci-fi its subtext, but it crops up in later entries too. She thinks a thread common to many science fiction movies is, ironically, deep fear of science. (One great science-fiction movie that’s about embracing science? Close Encounters. It’s unusual in that regard.)

Sanders is particularly well-suited to a part that shows scientific curiosity killing the cat, and, unexpectedly, he tethers his performance to domestic emotions he rarely shows in other movies. Sanders reacts to becoming an expectant papa as a cerebral man confronting one of life’s elemental joys. He doesn’t have fierce sexual chemistry with the classically gorgeous Barbara Shelley, who’s playing his wife, but such is the age difference you might not buy that anyway. Instead, his eyes follow her as if he can’t quite believe his luck, and you feel for him keenly when he realizes her pregnancy wasn’t luck at all. When Sanders proposes to teach the children himself, it’s the act of a man who’s been burned by domestic emotion, going back to the sphere where he always felt more at ease, anyway. It makes his final act all the more poignant.

People always ask how did I get such good performances out of you lot. Simple--I asked you to do nothing except be still and stare. Children fidget and I wanted you all to be absolutely still and steady and just stare. Very unchildlike, and, of course, very unsettling.
--Director Wolf Rilla addresses the youngest members of his Village of the Damned cast for a reunion on the U.K.’s Radio 4 in 2003; quoted in The Guardian, 12/4/03

What the Siren really liked about Village of the Damned, aside from the star, was the way an alien invasion was integrated into quite ordinary middle-class anxieties. There’s the fact, first of all, that the aliens choose to invade wombs and not airspace. That opening is weirdly sexy--the men are just out for the count, but what are the women experiencing? Apparently they don’t remember a thing, which is too bad for us as viewers; surely the Siren can’t be the only one dirty-minded enough to wonder about cross-galaxy mating. (Then again, if alien sex turned out to be like Demon Seed, an interesting movie that didn’t quite make the Siren’s list, it’s all for the best.) There’s a marvelously tense scene with a young girl going to her doctor and confronting the calamity of an unwed pregnancy in 1960, and trying to explain that she didn’t even do anything to get herself in this state. The anxieties of the men, whether it’s one deluded enough to think he’s the papa or one who's seethingly certain he isn’t, are also sharp and believable.

I knew it was an unusual part. I quietly liked it...having these very adult qualities and having control over the adult. Imagine having that power--and I could taste a bit of that. You realise how powerless you are as a child. I don't think I found it too much of a stretch, that part!"
--Martin Stephens (David Zellaby), ibid.

And the children themselves, with their flaxen hair and glowing eyes, are there at least in part to confirm our suspicion that there is something more than slightly creepy about a perfectly composed, adult-acting child. They’re a bit like miniature Georges, with their ramrod posture and their grammar so perfect they even differentiate between “shall” and “will.” Of course, to this day, the children mostly remind people of quite another group, especially after we see one of them as a toddler, telepathically commanding his mother to dunk her hand in boiling water after she accidentally overheats his bottle, one of the few genuinely frightening moments in a movie that’s more about anxiety than primal terror.

I don't think any of us were aware of it then, but of course now they remind you of the Hitler Youth, blond-haired Aryan children and all that. I'm convinced that was an unintentional subtext; after all, the war was still fresh in our memories. But none of us had any idea of the impact it would make.
--Rilla, ibid.

What the Siren didn’t like about Village was the military; god they’re a bunch of stiffs, with their maps and their brow-furrowing, even more than usual in a science-fiction film where the fate of the planet winds up resting with a civilian. Despite the movie’s crisp 78-minute length, every time it veers back to a meeting room with a map or a great big table or a desk and a telephone, suspense withers and time turtles.

Thank goodness for George, as always, finally confronting the fact that his son is never going to be fellow academic material and may in fact do something frightful, like try to take over the planet. The final scene, with the children surrounding George in a grim parody of classroom dynamics, now goes into the Siren’s large mental file of favorite Sanders moments.