From Friday through Thursday, the Music Box Theatre will present “Noir City: Chicago,” its the fifth in its annual series, coorganized by the San Francisco-based Film Noir Foundation. As usual, the selections range from classics to obscurities. From the first category, I’m excited to revisit Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950) and the Technicolor melodrama Leave Her to Heaven (1945), both of which should look fantastic on 35-millimeter. From the latter, I’m most intrigued by Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), which stars Edward G. Robinson as a phony psychic who gets cursed with the ability to see the future for real. (May the film offer a lesson to us all.) It’s directed by John Farrow, the prolific journeyman filmmaker behind at least one major noir, the expressionistic Ray Milland vehicle The Big Clock (1948). Farrow is represented twice on this year’s program; the other title is his Alias Nick Beal (1949), an update on the Faust legend starring Milland as the devil.
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There are a few other trends in this year’s series. In addition to the two Farrow movies, there are two directed by Cy Endfield, a blacklisted writer-director who worked in several other countries after fleeing the U.S. in 1951. Try and Get Me! (1950), one of Endfield’s last U.S. productions, stars Lloyd Bridges as an out-of-work veteran who’s persuaded to take part in a kidnapping and murder. Hell Drivers (1957), which he made in England, concerns an ex-con-turned-trucker who’s drawn into a dangerous competition organized by his crooked bosses. (Coincidentally, Endfield worked uncredited on the screenplay for the Douglas Sirk-directed feature Sleep, My Love (1948), which is also playing in the series.) In a piece he wrote for the Reader in 1992, Jonathan Rosenbaum defended Endfield as a major figure, claiming his “work has an uncommon intelligence so radically critical of the world we live in that it’s dangerous, threatening that world’s perpetuation.” The dark, foreboding style of the noir genre seems a perfect analogue for Endfield’s worldview.
It Always Rains on Sunday Rooted in the film noir of the 40s but anticipating the kitchen sink realism of the 50s, this superlative British drama (1947) transpires in the dingy Bethnal Green neighborhood of east London, where it probably rains Monday through Saturday as well. A former barmaid (Googie Withers) grimly keeps up her end of a loveless working-class marriage, barely concealing her jealousy toward her attractive young stepdaughters. When her former lover (John McCallum) breaks out of Dartmoor Prison and shows up at her doorstep, she can’t help but take him in. Robert Hamer, best known for directing Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), shows a fluency with noir’s shadowy visual vocabulary, but what really links this to the genre is its sense of haunting regret and lost opportunity. —J.R. Jones 92 min. Tue 8/27, 7:30 PM.
Sunset Boulevard Billy Wilder’s searing, funny, morbid look at the real tinsel beneath the phony tinsel (1950). Aging silent-movie vamp Gloria Swanson takes up with William Holden, a two-bit screenwriter on the make, and virtually holds him captive in her Hollywood gothic mansion. Erich von Stroheim, once her director, now her butler, is the other figure in this menage-a-weird. A tour de force for Swanson and one of Wilder’s better efforts. —Don Druker 110 min. Sun 8/25, 2:30 and 9:15 PM.
Fri-Thu 8/23-8/29 Music Box, 3733 N. Southport 773-871-6607musicboxtheatre.com Tickets are $10, $15 for double features; a festival pass is $75
