Third annual film series will be killer
By Dana DuGan
All my career I’ve wanted to push those boundaries, so we’ll do that in your valley as well.” Greg Olson
Imagine, if you will, a film noir theme park. The men lurking in alleys and bars would be dark, chiseled and cagey. The stylish women would be long-legged, cunning and alluring. The snappy dialogue would force park visitors to sit still in awe of the interplay of words, and the lighting would be shadowy and spikey. Also, it’d be dangerous in subtle ways. My kind of place.
“Film noir is low-down, sexed-up, over the speed limit,” Greg Olson, the curator of Seattle Art Museum films, wrote. “It’s the juvenile-delinquent child of brooding German Expressionist cinema aesthetics, French poetic realism and American pulp fiction, godfathered by post-World-War-II malaise and timeless moral corruption.”
Or, more simply stated, a damn good, edge-of-your-seat flick.
Inspired by the Seattle Arts Museum’s long-running film noir series, Hailey resident Jeannine Gregoire introduced her passion to the area three years ago.
Olson helps her choose the films for the Sun Valley Film Noir Series each year.
This year, the series is entitled “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” taken from the title of a noir novel by Horace McCoy, and a classic film adaptation with James Cagney.
The series will begin at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Magic Lantern Cinemas in Ketchum, with a screening of “Scarlet Street” (1945), directed by Austrian-German filmmaker Fritz Lang and starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea. In 2008, the American Film Institute nominated this film for its Top 10 Gangster Films list.
“Scarlet Street” is considered one of Lang’s best American films. Based on the French novel “La Chienne,” the film tells the tale of an unhappily married bank cashier with little to show for his life, who becomes obsessed with the beautiful woman he rescues one night.
An opening reception will take place at the Magic Lantern Cinemas at 6 p.m. before the film with opening remarks prior to the screening by Charles Brandt and Vernon Scott.
“Film noir deals in some things that strike us deeply – greed and guilt – whether the ultimate price is paid or not,” Olson said.
Art is cathartic but does that explain why we love these dangerous, uncomfortable, conniving stories so much?
“These are eternal questions,” Olson said. “We all have light and dark within us. It’s a way of delving into that dark side of our nature. In movies, we can see the humanness of it.”
Olson said that in curating the movies for the Sun Valley Film Noir Series, he has a sense of “educating the audience a little bit.” He started with the archetypal choices, Germanic directors, who’d fled the Nazis, like Lang, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Max Ophuls, and Robert Siodmak used what they knew of German expressionism in their work.
“They were used to envisioning mental states around the characters, the shadows, and tipping camera angles,” Olson said. “It was right out of lithographs and stage performances they might have seen. Then they came to Hollywood to direct domestic films. It makes sense they’d use what they knew and had seen. It’s very stylistic.
These directors – boy oh boy – they controlled and cared about every inch of those films. Details are really important.”
Olson said the second movie in the series, “The Killers,” has “big noir themes about how the past haunts us – it’s the presence of the past. It’s all convoluted time, with 11 flashbacks narrated by eight different people, but it flows on the screen.
“All my career I’ve wanted to push those boundaries, so we’ll do that in your valley as well,”
The Sun Valley Film Noir Series will continue on Thursday, Sept. 22, with “The Killers” (1946) directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner and Edmond O’Brien based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway (Idaho alert). On Thursday, Sept. 29, the screening will be “In a Lonely Place” (1950) directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart, and the inimitable Gloria Grahame (who was married to Ray at the time).
Tickets will be $10 at the Magic Lantern Cinemas box office the day of each film.
Serving as the public introduction to the Sun Valley Film Noir Series is the distinctive poster, using a photo of Gregoire herself, created by Boise-based artist Ward Hooper. Hooper’s work can currently be seen in the 32 Cells Art Show inspired by an Old Idaho Penitentiary inmate’s story and crime at the Swell Artist Collective Gallery, 404 South 8th Street, on the lower level of the Old Mercantile Building in the BoDo district, Boise.