Happy 20th Anniversary, Film Foundation

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting an array of feature-length films that are nearly operatic in scope, from last weekend’s noir classics, The Big Combo and They Made Me a Fugitive, to upcoming color-saturated melodramas and suspense thrillers.

Louise Brooks and Richard Arlen, Beggars of Life, 1928

LACMA’s Film Department is marking the 20th Anniversary of the Film Foundation, a non-profit founded by Martin Scorsese and other filmmakers in 1990. The Film Foundation has partnered with major film archives in the US and abroad, and has provided funding to preserve and restore nearly 545 films — a variety of productions that includes silents, documentaries and shorts, along with the kind of features that make it worth enduring a night in a Bing Auditorium seat.

October 15,  7:30 pm, Bonjour Tristesse, 1958

October 15,  9:15 pm, The Barefoot Contessa, 1954

October 16, 5:00 pm, Leave Her to Heaven, 1945

October 16 , 7:30 pm, Senso, 1954

October 23, 7:30 pm, Beggars of Life, 1928

October 29, 7:30 pm, Shadow of a Doubt, 1943

October 29, 9:30 pm, Cloak and Dagger, 1946

Another Hollywood Star Gets A Facelift

“I liked the way that anklet bit into her leg. 

I wanted to see her 
again, up close, without that silly staircase between us.” 

— Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), 
Double Indemnity, 1944

This week the Los Angeles Times is running a photo feature on the redesigned interior of the 1927 Spanish Colonial that starred as the home of married-but-seeking-divorce-by-homicide Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Billy Wilder’s classic film noir, Double Indemnity.

The original foyer was recreated as a stage set for the film. 
The home is now owned by interior designer Mae Brunken (who has also worked as a set decorator) who has revamped the Hollywood Hills home in true glam 1930s and 40s style, with a few refreshing modern touches.

The Los Angeles Times photo essay

Mae Brunken Design

Double Indemnity, the film

Double Indemnity, the book by James M. Cain

Go To Your Lonely Place

An angry, washed-up screenwriter, Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart).

A new neighbor, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame).

Adjacent garden court apartments.

A dead hat-check girl.

An alibi.

A love affair.

A loss of trust.

Welcome to the lush, shadowy world of In a Lonely Place, my favorite film noir, aside from those other two or three that I love best.

I found a blog that says everything I wish I’d said about Nicholas Ray’s romance gone bad, referencing Camus, Sartre, and all of the essential demons, including self-obsession, delusion, malaise, rage, repression and personal horror that I wish I could have written about half as well. But I didn’t; someone else did. If you want to read it, click here.

Or maybe you’ll see the movie -- I can’t urge you enough to put it on your watch list. And if you have seen it, then you already know that getting a massage is dangerous; it can lead to innuendo, gossip, tragedy and heartbreak. No good can come of it, but, by golly, you deserve a catharsis, and besides, you set up the shiatsu appointment weeks ago.

“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” — Dixon Steele to Laurel Gray, reading an excerpt from his screenplay that mirrors the shards of his own life.

French Crime Wave Hits Los Angeles

Art meets the underworld at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is featuring French crime thrillers this weekend through June 20. Série Noire depicts 1950s/60s/70s French society and its trench-coat, fedora-wearing denizens: gangsters, gunslingers, gamblers, rogue cops, bank robbers, jewel thieves, thugs, bar flies, tricksters dangerous dames... 

See the mean streets through the eyes of Jacques Becker, René Clement, Alain Corneau, Jules Dassin, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Sautet, Bertrand Tavernier, and François Truffaut. This dark celebration includes films based on work by Jim Thompson, David Goodis and August Le Betron (who did time!), so grab your moll, leave the gun, and go see the series.

May 29  7:30 pm  Série Noire

May 29  9:30 pm  The Clockmaker

May 30  7:30 pm  Police Python 357

June 5  7:30 pm  Bob le flambeur

June 5  9:20 pm  Le Doulos

June 6  7:30 pm  Touchez pas au Grisbi

June 6  9:10 pm  Rififi

June 12  7:30 pm  Le cercle rouge

June 13  7:30 pm  Purple Noon

June 13  9:35 pm  Elevator to the Gallows

June 19  7:30 pm  Classe tous risques

June 19  9:20 pm  Garde à vue

June 20  7:30 pm  Coup de torchon 

June 20  9:45 pm  Shoot the Piano Player

LACMA  |  5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036  |  323 857 6000  |  http://www.lacma.org/

Jules Dassin At The Aero

The Aero will screen six of Jules Dassin’s most acclaimed urban noir films this weekend, May 15 — May 17. As a director, screenwriter and actor, Dassin first gained Hollywood fame before fleeing the blacklist to Paris in 1953.

Although he spoke only a little French, Dassin directed Rififi in 1954 and won best director the year after that. Rififi inspired Ocean’s Eleven, Mission Impossible and other genre films. Realism, expressionism, grit and sentimentality mingle in Dassin’s gallery of cops, robbers, rogues, promoters, truckers, prostitutes and the occasional chanteuse. Each night of this weekend’s tribute offers double-trouble with cool blondes, dark themes and smoking guns.

Friday, May 15, 7:30 pm

The Naked City (1948) and Never on Sunday (1960)

Saturday, May 16, 7:30 pm

Rififi (1955) and Topkapi (1964)

Sunday, May 17, 7:30 pm

Night And The City (1950) and Thieves’ Highway (1949)

American Cinematheque at The Aero Theatre

1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90403