THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF: SAN FRANCISCO & THE MOVIES—By Frako Loden

My first-ever peek into the National Historic Landmark Old Mint Building at Fifth and Mission Streets was to preview a new exhibit there running only for nine days: "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: San Francisco and the Movies." From June 16 to 24, the ground-floor rooms of this institution will display posters, photographs and artifacts of the love affair between cinema and one of its most photogenic cities, hosted by the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society (SFMHS).

Curator Miguel Pendás first took us to the chamber housing San Francisco's silent-film history, and there Niles Essanay Silent Film historian David Kiehn pointed out the corner featuring photographer / murderer Eadweard Muybridge, who hosted the first moving-picture exhibition here in 1880. You'll be able to watch the highly immersive "A Trip Down Market Street" by the Miles Brothers, who shot it just days before the 1906 earthquake. Materials will commemorate the California Motion Picture Corporation in San Rafael and of course Essanay Studios, celebrating its centenary this year, where Westerns were born and where Charlie Chaplin developed his Tramp character and shot films in Golden Gate Park as well as the studio's headquarters in Niles.



Author / impresario Eddie Muller introduced the film noir room, where the first poster he acquired—of Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill (1947)—hangs among several others collected by himself and film programmer Gary Meyer. He was thrilled to learn just recently that the former Hearst building at Third and Market where his grandfather was a pressman and which contained a speakeasy, now boasts a cocktail lounge. The gold vault of the Old Mint is now the Maltese Falcon room, containing a figure of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), a projected "dream" version of scenes from the film, and the mysterious black bird itself owned by John Konstin of John's Grill, where Dashiell Hammett drank, dined and wrote. True to its status in the 1941 John Huston film, the statuette is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.

In the room housing materials from more recent studios like Lucasfilm and Pixar, we were told we could take only wide photos and no closeups. Here you'll see inspirational digital sketches for characters like Edna Mode (from The Incredibles), Wall-E, Princess Merida (from Brave), and many others.

In the main corridor hang paintings by Kim Novak, the eternal San Francisco heroine from her haunting turn as Madeleine in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Pendás says that Novak was offered a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago at the same time she was scouted by Hollywood. After her movie career she moved to Oregon, where she now paints winsome Impressionist-style pastels. Pendás says she felt "vulnerable" about displaying her art for the first time, figuring nobody would be interested. Novak will be receiving the San Francisco Cinematic Icon Award at the SFMHS Standing Ovations benefit gala on June 14. Pendás said, "Frankly, I think she's going to be mobbed."

One beautiful spacious room is devoted to San Francisco's independent, experimental and documentary film scene. The Pacific Film Archive lent out materials including a landmark "Art in Cinema" program put on by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art starting in 1946. Another room features films shot in Chinatown, one of the most photogenic locations in the world, from the early days of the tong-war / opium-den / white-slavery mystique to the pivotal Wayne Wang film Chan is Missing (1982), when Chinese Americans started to explore the district from their point of view.

A wax figure of Clint Eastwood standing on a red carpet before a San Francisco International Film Festival backdrop—you can have your photo taken with him—dominates a room telling the history of the San Francisco Film Commission and the 55-year-old film festival through photographs by Pamela Gentile. Another large room explores movies in the themes of "Cars, Cops and Cocktails," dealing with chase scenes, shootouts and drinks unique to the city. Learn cocktail recipes, test your trivia knowledge (what cocktail did Michael Douglas order in Basic Instinct?), and ogle Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum (did he fire six shots or only five?). The main corridor features photos of local movie theatres by R.A. McBride and set photos from Dirty Harry (1971), Take the Money and Run (1969), and Petulia (1968) by Morton Beebe.

The Vertigo room, showcasing perhaps the most romantic (and geographically accurate) film shot in San Francisco, contains the continuity script and the Vistavision camera used to shoot the film. Most intriguing of all will be the "Contemplating Carlotta" corner, where a bench is set up for viewing a copy of the Carlotta portrait as Madeleine does at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in the film. As you contemplate, you'll hear ambient sounds of old Fort Point, where Madeleine was next compelled to drive her sea-green Jaguar and take a dip in San Francisco Bay.

June 16-24, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
The Old Mint, Fifth and Mission Streets, San Francisco
Admission $5 SFMHS members, $10 general public
Standing Ovations benefit gala Thursday, June 14

NOIR CITY X: ANGIE!

It's clearly time to start brushing up on Angie Dickinson's career in anticipation of her on-stage appearance with the "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller at the upcoming 10th edition of Noir City where 35mm prints of two of Dickinson's finest—The Killers (1964) and Point Blank (1967)—will be screened at the world's most popular film noir festival. Where best to start than with David Thomson's entry in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, wherein he pointedly quips that one thousand words of analysis won't carry more weight than a well-chosen still. Good advice from an ardent admirer.

Thomson likewise wrote a piece on Angie for GQ magazine back in October 2005 profiling Dickinson's career, confirming once and for all that it isn't just Nicole Kidman he has a "thing" for. ‎"It wasn't that I necessarily thought she was a great actress," Thomson writes in his GQ piece, "just my favorite. You see, I had this notion that, as the years went by and you saw most of the movies that came along, you could enjoy the difference between someone who was plainly a Great Actress and someone you were simply glad to see, a woman you thought of as a pal—always effective, a reliable doll." His overview ends up being, admittedly, "not an essay on celebrity, so much as a reflection on fondness and how it can last." Thomson concludes: "No, she wasn't the greatest actress ever, just my favorite—which means that for a certain kind of movie dream, in the role of a woman as brave as she is gorgeous, as smart as she is funny, I never saw anyone better." (GQ, October 2005, pp. 126-134.)

Of the two films screening at Noir City X, Thomson situates them within "a trio of terrific performances from the mid-Sixties", which includes The Chase (1966). Angie plays "the treacherous romantic lead in The Killers, a film where she is torn between John Cassavetes and Ronald Reagan, and in which Reagan slaps her in the face very hard." In the "extraordinary" Point Blank, Angie "is the ambivalent woman who elects to help Lee Marvin in his implacable attempt to recover $93,000 from the Mob. There are scenes in that film where she offers herself as bait to the villainous John Vernon that are hauntingly sexy. There's also a scene where she beats on the impassive Marvin and collapses in frustration as he hardly notices her."

Then, of course, there is—perhaps—the "definitive" overview: Sam Kashner's piece for Vanity Fair ("A Legend With Legs"). If that isn't enough for you, revisit Dennis Cozzalio's April 2006 Angie Dickinson blogathon at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.

But enough words. Time to follow Thomson's advice.

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK / LA MARIÉE ÉTAIT EN NOIR (1968)—On-stage Conversation With Laura Truffaut and Eddie Muller

"For to kill is the great law set by nature in the heart of existence! There is nothing more beautiful and honorable than killing!"—Guy de Maupassant.

At MUBI, Adrian Curry has curated a stunning gallery of posters for François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (La mariée était en noir, 1968) on the occasion of the film's re-release at New York's Film Forum. Also at MUBI, Daniel Kasman offers an object lesson in visual acuity by astutely comparing an Econolite train motion lamp (with "General" engine) as it appears in both The Bride Wore Black and Wim Wender's The American Friend (1977). Then, of course, David Hudson has rounded up a few key reviews from the Forum run, most notably my San Francisco Film Critics Circle colleague Fernando Croce's burnished piece for Slant.

Here on the West Coast, The Bride Wore Black showed up in the Pacific Film Archive's Enduring Allure retrospective of the films of Jeanne Moreau, which is where I caught up with Truffaut's adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's 1940 novel. PFA characterized The Bride Wore Black as Truffaut's alleged homage to Alfred Hitchcock "treated in the manner of Renoir." The San Francisco Film Society followed suit less than a week later with a brief run of a new 35mm print of The Bride Wore Black at New People Cinema, where I attended their first screening on Friday, December 16, 2011, specifically to hear Eddie Muller engage Laura Truffaut in an onstage conversation before her father's film.

Laura Truffaut, who has lived in the Bay Area for 30+ years, has now and again offered distinct insight into her father's films at various Bay Area presentations. I heard her introduce Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) at PFA in January 2008, and L'Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970) at a Landmark screening in March 2009, and so I welcomed the opportunity to hear her a third time, which I knew would be a charm.

By way of introduction, Muller had mentioned earlier to Laura Truffaut that her father's book on Hitchcock was the very first film book he ever owned and read. As a kid, he had mentioned that he really liked Hitchcock's movies and a family friend gifted him the book, thereby changing his life. Shortly thereafter, he saw François Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine (Day For Night, 1973) and—smitten by the romance for moviemaking in that film—the die was cast. He said to himself, "That's the life for me. It has to somehow involve the movies."

Inviting Truffaut to the stage, Muller prefaced their conversation by confirming that he considers The Bride Wore Black to be a film noir, partly because it was based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich who, as a writer, was one of the key figures in the development of noir as literature in the United States. Woolrich's books translated very well to France, many of them appearing in the Série noire that was, in turn, influential on the French New Wave. Certain themes in Woolrich's work—i.e., the cruel indifference of fate—appealed to a French sensibility.

Not only that, Truffaut agreed, but Woolrich's themes of shifting personality, of one person turning out to be someone else, was an equally influential theme. Perhaps not as present in The Bride Wore Black as in La sirène du Mississipi (Mississippi Mermaid, 1969), another Woolrich adaptation of her father's made shortly after The Bride Wore Black.

Muller suggested that—by the time the film was made in 1968—a lot of people perceived it as a somewhat revisionist take on Woolrich's novel because it focused on the femme fatale figure as the protagonist. What Truffaut did with the character of Julie Kohler (Moreau) and his depiction of the men in the film who become her victims was markedly different than how Woolrich treated these characters in his novel. However, Truffaut stuck close to the structure of the book, replicating the novel's five episodes. Truffaut's adaptation was about the cruel indifference of fate, a protagonist bent on self-destruction, and encouraged the audience to empathize with a person who was doing something very wrong, who knew she was doing something wrong, but who went ahead and did it anyway. For Muller, those are three essentials for a film noir.

Though in the case of her father's film, Truffaut differentiated—unsure if this would apply generally to film noir—that there was also an attempt not to psychologize at all. There was something quite stylized about the story. Likening it a bit to a dark fairytale, Truffaut explained her father's challenge was indeed to gain the audience's empathy for Julie Kohler, but also to keep them involved and interested in the linear logic of the story, a creative challenge that was of considerable interest to her father. Later in his career in the late '70s he went on to film L'Histoire d'Adèle H (The Story of Adele H, 1975), L'Homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women, 1977) and La chambre verte (The Green Room, 1978), wherein he focused on stories where the main characters follow an implacable logic. It remained a challenge for him to keep the audience interested in one character in a narrative limited by directions in which the story could go. He thought about it in musical terms: to follow a line, what he called an "ascending straight line." Not all of his movies were following that pattern, but The Bride Wore Black was probably the first film where he started doing that.

One way he addressed this challenge was to rely on strong acting. Her father had loved working with Jeanne Moreau on Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim, 1962) and he knew that having her as the central character in The Bride Wore Black would carry the movie; but, he also knew that the actors who played the men she encountered had to be equally good and compellingly hold their own. He found a number of them in the theater, which he attended frequently, often casting for actors for his films. A number of the actors in The Bride Wore Black subsequently appeared in his later movies.

The one character he was, perhaps, most attached to in The Bride Wore Black was Fergus, the artist, played by Charles Denner. She was seven when her father made this movie and it was the first film of his she was allowed to see in the theaters when it opened. She recalled her father sometimes liked to work on Sunday mornings going over dailies with his editor at a nearby screening room and he would let her and her sister come with him. There were scenes from the movie that she had easily seen 10 times over before the movie was finished, including a scene or two that were eventually cut, but which she recalled vividly; scenes that involved the character Fergus. Her father probably decided the scenes were too long and would throw off the balance of the film, so they were deleted; but, 10 years later, he revisited a similar character and used the same actor in The Man Who Loved Women. So The Bride Wore Black is both an adaptation of a novel but also something very personal for her father that he was able to return to later on in subsequent films.

It was Muller's understanding that François Truffaut was dissatisfied with the finished film and Laura confirmed her father had difficulty with the color. It was only his second time to use color in a film. His first films were all small budget black and white New Wave movies and then he went to England to make Farenheit 451 (1966), which was a British production with a lot more money that required color for many reasons. When he came back to France to do The Bride Wore Black, it became clear the film was also going to be in color. Later on as her father progressed in his career, he laid down rules for himself, including how to use color—how to use color in his period movies and how to use color in his more contemporary pieces—but, at the time of The Bride Wore Black, he hadn't quite figured it out. She suspects it was frustrating for him to figure out how to create atmosphere with color. If you think of what are considered to be the great adaptations of Cornell Woolrich, they're primarily in black and white. Femme fatales seem to be more fatale in black and white. That could have been an issue creating tension. For her, The Bride Wore Black is visually distinct from her father's other movies, probably because of those issues.

It was also Muller's understanding that her father had creative differences with his cinematographer Raoul Coutard who was working at the same time with Godard? In that regard, one of her father's challenges was that the protagonist was supposed to be traveling between one man and the other, as the story moves forward, but unfortunately for budgetary reasons most of the film had to be filmed in one geographic area. So her father and Coutard had to modify the storyline visually, made all the more trickier by the movie being in color, and create the illusion of different landscapes. There was definitely differences of opinion and approach between Coutard and her father.

Muller noted that The Bride Wore Black was the first Woolrich novel written in what is considered his "black period." Woolrich was a fascinating man. He was a closeted homosexual who lived at the Hotel Marseilles in New York with his mother virtually his whole life and he had absolutely no real experience of the outside world. He was the most socially inept human being imaginable. Despite Woolrich's extraordinary imagination, Muller couldn't imagine a person less like François Truffaut than Cornell Woolrich. Woolrich started writing his noir novels cooped up in his hotel room with The Bride Wore Black being the first of a series. Its structure was extraordinary innovative. Woolrich didn't reveal the motivations of the protagonist until the very end of the book so the reader was going through this whole story—as audiences did with the film—wondering why Julie Kohler was doing what she was doing.

Truffaut thinks her father decided to move it up a little bit, partly influenced by Hitchcock's understanding of how to manipulate audiences with suspense. When do you bring a flashback into a movie like The Bride Wore Black? A flashback or two was going to be necessary so her father gave much thought to when he would bring them in. Her father eventually agreed that Hitchcock's precept of letting the audience "in on it" early on actually created more suspense than a big revelation at the end. Another Hitchcock touch was that you never saw Jeanne Moreau's character knock on a door or enter a room. A couple of times in the movie she's suddenly just there, without explanation. Truffaut was fairly certain her father stole that from the character of Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940). Hitchcock made a point of not letting the audience hear Mrs. Danvers' footsteps so that they would be as startled as the protagonist Joan Fontaine when she lifted her glance and Mrs. Danvers was standing there observing her. Obviously, for the character of Mrs. Danvers, this was meant to be spooky. With Julie Kohler, it's meant to be more magical perhaps? She's suddenly in the middle of the scene and there isn't a whole lot of logic to it; the audience needs to accept it as a given.

Muller agreed that her father brought an element of magical realism to the film that compensated for a huge flaw in the original novel, which—not to spoil the plot—but you do wonder at one point how she knows who these men are? That's a crucial point in the story that's never explained. The way her father presented this as a given in the film eliminated the incongruency from the audience's mind. Julie just appears, almost like a supernatural force. There's no realism involved in it.

Muller asked Truffaut if she had ever met Hitchcock as a child? She hadn't. He wondered because—she may not have noticed as a young girl—but the relationship Hitchcock and her father shared was an intense bond between their two artistries. It fascinated Muller that—while her dad was making this film—his closest confidante was really Hitchcock, who was included in all the correspondence. Her dad was asking him questions all the time. She did attend Hitchcock's funeral under a peculiar set of circumstances.

Truffaut wanted to point out the unsung actor Serge Rousseau who plays David the groom (who the audience sees for only 10 seconds). He was one of her father's best friends. He was a casting agent, an actors' agent, and often played crucial small roles in her father's movies. Rousseau was actually an excellent actor who had given up on acting himself. He played the character at the end of Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968) who the audience has seen follow Claude Jade throughout the movie. At the very end he comes up to her sitting on the park bench and declares his love and proposes. He tells her, "Every other relationship is temporary but with me it will be forever." In The Green Room he plays the nemesis of the hero. We only see him in photographs but we hear his name mentioned constantly. So Rousseau played a big role in her father's life by pointing out to him interesting young actors who Truffaut would then watch perform in the theater and often hire for his films.

There was a story behind the name of the protagonist: Julie Kohler. Julie is a name that her father was fond of, though she never found out why. Kohler was a brand of chocolate that her father liked a lot as a child. He liked that name so much that he used it again in Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960) where he named his protagonist Charlie Kohler. Of course, Kohler is also a homonym for colère, which means anger.

Everything Muller has read on this film indicates that it was made at a difficult time in her father's life, which undoubtedly colors his conflicted recollections of the film itself; but, Muller finds the film extraordinary. He's reached a point where he thinks of film noir in thematic terms and for him The Bride Wore Black is a classic thematic example of a film noir. He's impressed with her father's sensitivity to these types of stories, to the work of American writers like Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis (whose novel Down There Truffaut adapted into Shoot the Piano Player, "another classic noir"). The American narrative style tended to be tough, hard-edged and coldhearted; but, her father wasn't like that at all. No one would ever say that François Truffaut was a coldhearted filmmaker. Quite the opposite. He was probably the most humanistic filmmaker of his era. To see him adapt these kinds of stories made them doubly fascinating.

Laura Truffaut concluded by recalling that her father was keen on quoting Jean Renoir: every man has his reasons, which applies to any character in a movie. Muller identified the quote from La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939) where, more to the point, the full quote specifies that "the most terrifying thing is that every man has his reasons."

Of related interest: John Goodman's interview with Laura Truffaut for the North Shore News.

NOIR CITY XMAS—Eddie Muller Intro to Deanna Durbin Doublebill

The Film Noir Foundation's second annual Noir City Xmas was held December 14, 2011 at San Francisco's historic Castro Theatre, offering a double-feature of rare noir-stained yuletide classics "to darken our spirits this holiday season." The evening also featured the unveiling of the full schedule for Noir City X, the 10th anniversary of the world's most popular film noir festival, coming to the Castro Theatre January 20-29, 2012.

Bill Arney—the now legendary disembodied "Voice of Film Noir"—hesitated to welcome the audience to the second "annual" Noir City Xmas because "just how many Noir City Xmas movies can there be?" Asking if the audience had been good this year, Arney was met with a resounding, "NO!" to which he responded, "What the hell is wrong with you? There's still a little over a week," he added "to get over yourself and make some trouble. Santa will be sorely disappointed if he doesn't get to fill every stocking in Noir City with coal this year. In some places this holiday is a winter wonderland, but here in Noir City it's just cold." Varney then introduced his boss, the "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller: "The guy who only puts goodies in your cinematic stocking."

Muller took to the Castro stage and wished everyone a "cruel Yule." "You learn to expect the unexpected at Noir City," he offered. "Hence, a film noir double-bill starring Deanna Durbin. Here's the reality of film programming in 2011. As Bill said in his introduction, how many film noir Christmas movies can there be, right? So we have to parcel these out very intelligently. The plan originally was to show Christmas Holiday (1944) and Holiday Affair (1949) as our double-bill this year and next year we would have Lady On a Train (1945) and The Lady in the Lake (1947), which was set at Christmas, right? But, could we get Holiday Affair in a 35mm print? No. Because it no longer exists. This is a major problem. And that is why—when someone asked me earlier, 'What's the theme of this year's Noir City festival?'—I said, 'The theme is you better see it in 35mm while you can.' That is actually the theme of the festival and I'm very happy to say and proud to say that everything we will be screening at Noir City X will be in 35mm."

"I will not be on the soapbox tonight," Muller assured us, "but, I will be stationed on that soapbox during January because this has really become a serious issue. We cannot actually fight the tide forever—we are going to be living in a digital future—but, we have to do everything we possibly can to insure that films that do not exist digitally or on 35mm are preserved as films, or they will never be able to be shown in the future digitally or any other way."

Excited that his audience had been given a peek at the upcoming line-up for Noir City X, Muller emphasized he was especially excited because of his super special guest who would be appearing on the first Saturday night with The Killers (1964) and Point Blank (1967): Angie Dickinson! "I've already been warned to lay off the stuff about the White House and Jack Kennedy and all of that—I'm not going there—so I'll get it all out right now: they say she went in Police Girl and she came out Police Woman."

Among the marvelous preservations that will be shown at Noir City X is a brand new print of Naked Alibi (1954) starring Gloria Grahame, struck by Universal specifically for Noir City. "All you need to know," Muller insisted, "is that it's called Naked Alibi." Further, in light of the upcoming Baz Luhrmann adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 classic The Great Gatsby (featuring Leonardo DiCaprio), Noir City has rescued from obscurity the 1949 film noir version of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby starring Alan Ladd, which has not been shown theatrically since 1974 when it was put into deep storage to make way for the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow vehicle. Thanks to Noir City's good friends at Universal Studios, the 1949 version will finally be seen again. The Great Gatsby will be shown with Three Strangers (1946), whose preservation has been funded by the Film Noir Foundation. Finally, last but not least, The Film Noir Foundation vied with Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation to restore The Breaking Point (1950). Scorsese won that particular competition but Muller bears no regrets since it's one of his favorite films, one he has shown at other film noir festivals, thereby singlehandedly destroying the only existing good print left of the film. Muller is delighted that the film has been completely restored and that Scorsese and the Film Foundation have graciously allowed Noir City to be the first venue to show that brand-new print.

To celebrate Noir City's 10th anniversary in style, on Saturday night, January 28, Noir City will be hosting its first-ever Noir City Nightclub called—appropriately enough—"Everyone Comes to Eddie's". Noir City is converting the Swedish American Hall into a sexy and sinister 1940s nightclub with live entertainment "for your edification."

Another highlight of Noir City X will be the all-day Dashiell Hammett marathon, featuring films based on Hammett's stories, including such rareties as Roadhouse Nights (1930) and Mister Dynamite (1935). Richard Laymann, the world's foremost scholar on Dashiell Hammett (Shadowman: The Life of Dashiell Hammett, 1981), will be flying in to Noir City because he has never seen Mister Dynamite, that's how rarely it's shown.

Finally, with regard to "the super sexy poster" for Noir City X, the photograph was actually taken in Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco apartment where he lived and wrote The Dain Curse (1929), Red Harvest (1929) and The Maltese Falcon (1930). Bill Arney, the "Voice of Noir City" resided in Hammett's apartment for many years and—looking at this poster—Muller had to ask Arney why he ever left? "Well," Arney responded, "the last one of those dames that came over there told me that the Murphy bed was very comfortable. I told her not to get too comfortable. And then I married her."

Turning to the evening's double-bill, Muller recalled that Deanna Durbin was once one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood and, as a girl, was credited with rescuing Universal Studios from bankruptcy in the 1930s when she became, by far, the most popular female performer in the United States. She had an outstanding singing voice and an amazing on-screen charisma and was everybody's favorite "girl next door" and the Great American Gal. But, of course, as she grew older, she chafed at being typecast in such roles. As she grew up into a woman, she wanted to stretch out and do other things.

In Lady on a Train, Nikki Collins (Durbin) witnesses a murder while waiting for a train, but can't get the police to believe her when no body is discovered. While they dismiss her as daft, she enlists the help of a mystery writer to sleuth out the culprits on her own. Based on a story by veteran mystery writer Leslie Charteris (The Saint), this is a wildly entertaining mix of comedy, musical, and suspense, rendered in evocative noir style by cameraman Woody Bredell (Phantom Lady, Christmas Holiday, The Killers), and featuring a superb cast of sinister and suspicious supporting players swirling ominously around "America's Sweetheart."

Muller promised his audience that they would love Lady On A Train. "You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll tap your feet to this charming film that is, unfortunately, not very well known." Lady On a Train was one of only two films directed by Charles Henri David who would—after this film—become Mr. Deanna Durbin. In 1948 when Durbin decided that her string had played out in Hollywood, she married David and smartly moved to France where, Muller was happy to say, she lives to this day, having recently turned 90 years old on December 4.

Watching Lady On a Train with me was my friend Mike Black who reminded me of an anecdote from Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest: "Deanna Durbin [was] a child soprano and competitor of Judy Garland, whose imitations of her rival were marvelously cruel, invoking a crooked arm and a radiant mad smile to match luminous crossed eyes. But Garland could be equally mordant about herself. When she had made her triumphant comeback at the Palladium in London, inspired by merry schadenfreude, she rang her now-forgotten rival. After many delays and false starts, Garland got the sleepy, ill-tempered Durbin at home in the French countryside. 'Tonight I had the greatest audience of my life!' At length, Judy recounted her triumph. Finally, out of breath, she stopped. There was a long silence. Then a pitying voice said: 'Are you still in that asshole business?' "

In Christmas Holiday, a young soldier gets more than he bargained for on a holiday stopover in New Orleans when he is introduced to a young "singer" (prostitute) and a local "nightclub" (brothel) and he learns the tale of her descent into degradation. Venerable scribe Herman Mankiewicz hews Somerset Maugham's novel into a brilliant script, directed with delirious intensity by Siodmak. Deanna Durbin is memorable in her first adult role, and Gene Kelly is unforgettable as the murderous cad with whom she tragically falls in love. Unquestionably the most romantically soul-crushing Christmas movie ever made.

Muller considers Siodmak to be the greatest director of film noir there ever was and describes Christmas Holiday as a strange and mesmerizing film. "Why it's called Christmas Holiday, who the hell knows," Muller laughed but assured his audience that by the end of the film they would leave the Castro Theater thoroughly depressed. "That's our mission. Happy to fulfill it."

Muller dedicated the evening to Deanna Durbin, as well as to an old friend of his who passed away this year—one he recalls watching Christmas Holiday with in the Castro Theater—his great pal and mentor George Kuchar.

Of related interest: At Greenbriar Picture Shows, John McElwee responds to Noir City Xmas with a write-up on the Durbin films plus a lovely gallery.

DARK COUNTRY (2009)—On-stage Conversation With Thomas Jane and Eddie Muller

As dreadful and terrifying as Dark Country (2009) became by film's end, Eddie Muller insisted this horror-noir thriller was his type of a fun movie. With director-actor Thomas Jane joining him on-stage at the Castro Theatre for the film's one-off theatrical screening on November 18, 2011, and with their conversation being filmed (in 3D) for inclusion in the deluxe DVD release, Muller wasted no time eliciting Jane's commentary on the making of the film and tracing Dark Country's inspirations. "Was it obvious," Muller asked, "when you were finally going to direct the film that it was going to be a film like this?"

Jane responded that—for his first-time directorial effort—he had been looking for a project small enough to contain, which even then turned out to have its own set of incredible problems. A huge film noir fan, Jane had grown up reading EC comic books and watching The Twilight Zone: all influences on Dark Country. The project kicked off when a good friend of his sent him a dark and twisted short story by Tab Murphy—known more for writing screenplays for Disney's animated films The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Tarzan (1999)—and Jane knew right off that it would make a good film. Since after doing The Punisher (2004) Jane had a deal with Lionsgate, they bought the idea for Dark Country for $3,000,000 and hired Murphy to draft a script. But when at their first production meeting Jane proposed to Lionsgate that the film should be shot in 3D, they balked and backed out. No one was doing 3D at that time. Jane's suggestion was at least a full year ahead of the 3D curve.

But Jane was committed to the idea, having already met Ray "3D" Zone, who was known for his pioneering methods of converting flat images (in particular, comic books) into 3D images. Jane had grown up reading 3D comics like The Rocketeer and Twisted Tales that featured Zone's stereoscopic effects and so—when they met at a meeting of the Stereo Club of Southern California (SCSC), an organization formed in 1950—Jane took the opportunity to express his admiration of Zone's 3D comics and mentioned that he wanted to work with him. Jane joked that the SCSC gets together in a church basement once a month to show each other nudie pictures in 3D; but, the bottom line was that SCSC members are the leading experts in their craft. They encouraged Jane to consider making a film in 3D and were already creating work on their own jerryrigged 3D cameras back when people were first starting to make their own movies on the RED and DSLRs. It was at the SCSC meetings that Jane learned about how technological advancements were affecting the way 3D movies were being made and how the seeds of the 3D movement were being planted.

Once Lionsgate backed away from the concept, wishing him good luck, Jane arranged for a meeting with Sony Home Video, who agreed to the project because they were hoping for homegrown content to support the 3D televisions they knew they would be placing in people's homes in the near future. Unfortunately there were no cameras to shoot a 3D film and no experienced 3D cinematographers so Jane hunted down Paradise FX who had done all the 3D effects for amusement park rides and convinced them to jump on board to engineer a 3D movie. They broke new ground. They rigged up huge cameras out in the desert with operators connected to cables, cables running all along the ground, and often the weather was so cold that the static electricity froze the cables up so that they couldn't shoot. A simple story with four characters that Jane thought would be a great way to "pop his cherry" as a director turned into a little bit more than he could chew.

Nonetheless, Jane persevered because he wanted the film to look like Edward Ulmer's Detour (1945), one of his favorite noirs. Paying homage to films from the '30s and the '40s, Jane utilized rear screen projections to create effects Muller described as "fabulous artificiality." Muller praised that Jane sought to create "a complete non-existent netherworld out there in the desert where anything can happen. How many claps of lightning can you have in one shot? I mean, it's fantastic." The film was shot quickly over two weeks and Jane pursued the feel of "hand-made set pieces" characteristic of noirs-made-on-the-cheap-and-dirty. When Jane cast Lauren German as Gina, he gave her a copy of Detour as homework for her part. Other direct influences on Dark Country besides Detour were Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), from which Jane cribbed. A few ideas were also lifted from David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997).

Muller singled out the shot where Jane comes out of the diner and the camera circles 360° around his car at the gaspump. "I could almost feel Tom Neal and Ann Savage hitchhiking on the side of the road," Muller evoked. "I could almost feel the black and white creeping in." Jane had, in fact, tried to convince Sony to shoot the film in black and white—an idea that didn't go over well—even though he was convinced it would be "cool." Muller was wondering what gave Jane "the stones" to go into Sony and ask for 3D and B&W? Jane admitted: "I was just excited by the possibility of breaking new ground and doing something that hadn't been done before on a budget where no risk was involved."

Jane's ideal version of Dark Country would have been 79 minutes long and that was the way he planned it because it was the way he'd always wanted it. As a further homage to Detour (which Ulmer pared down to a concise 68 minutes), Jane wanted his film short. He fantasized that—with Eddie Muller doing commentary on his 79-minute film—it would become the noir of his dreams. But when Sony saw the film they gave him a note that the film needed to be at least five minutes longer. "Are you kidding me?" he thought. "This is a note from the studio? They want me to add something back in? Seriously?" Sony insisted because—in order for certain of their territories to buy and distribute the DVD—the film had to be 84 minutes long. That's why, Jane apologized, some of the scenes in the car are desultory and a bit talky. Originally, those scenes had fallen to the editing room floor on day one.

How tough was it, Muller queried, to not only come up with all these technological advances and direct the film but to also perform in front of the camera? Overwhelmed, Jane phoned up Mel Gibson. "The first guy to go to for advice, right?" Muller quipped. Jane told Gibson he was making this little movie over at Sony that was going straight to video but that he was also directing it, as well as acting in it, and how would one go about that? Gibson sympathized, "Yup. Yup. My first film was this little film Man Without A Face (1993) and it occurred to me that I had never directed so I nervously phoned up Clint Eastwood." Eastwood told Gibson he had experienced the same problem. "Don't tell me Clint called up Kevin Costner?" Muller laughingly interjected. No, Jane rallied, Eastwood didn't call Kevin Costner; but, he did call his buddy Don Siegel who told Eastwood not to shortchange himself as an actor just because he was directing as well. He told him to treat himself like he treated any other actor. "The tendency would be to shoot yourself and get on with it," Siegel warned, "but don't do that. Take the time and do what you would do acting with anyone else. Watch playback and treat it like a job. Take it seriously." Gibson talked to Jane for over an hour, offered all kinds of advice, and after their conversation Jane felt he might be able to pull the film off after all.

To make sure, Jane strategized that it would help to have extra eyes around on set so he hired Ray Zone as his 3D consultant. [Zone speaks to the experience on his own website.] Jane had already overprepared for the film by storyboarding every shot of the movie with storyboard artist Dave Allcock. They used a little toy car to set up the shots, which was a lot of fun. ( Dave, incidentally, has a cameo in Dark Country. He and his girlfriend are on the missing poster.)

Then Ray Zone and Jane sat down at Jane's kitchen table and worked on the storyboard Jane had developed with Allcock. They developed a fun, color-coded system where they used magic markers to color every storyboard frame with different colors to indicate where they wanted the 3D to sit. Blue was in the frame, red was outside the frame and yellow was somewhere in the middle. That was their method for constructing the 3D in such a way that there would be continuity to the shots and they wouldn't be jarring or out of focus. But most importantly, learning from and building upon the mistakes that were made with 3D in the 1950s, Jane challenged himself by questioning how 3D effects could be used as part of the storytelling rather than mere spectacle? In Dark Country Jane tried to harness 3D to create a psychological landscape within the interior of the car. Muller riffed: "It's interesting you cite Detour. All the times that I've introduced Detour at film noir festivals, I always say, 'This movie is so cheap. It's so simple. It goes to show you that all you need to make film noir is a man, a woman, and a locked hotel room. And so you now prove that all you need is a man, a woman and a car in the desert. That's it!"

Jane qualified it should be a sexy car, which led Muller to mention that he originally thought Jane had removed the rear view mirror from the window of the car and placed it on the dashboard as a way to get around issues with the 3D filming, but Jane advised him that, no, the 1960-1961 Dodge Phoenix came with the rear view mirror on the dashboard; but, the real challenge was that they had to find three cars: two for use on the road and one in the studio. Thus, the initial 360° shot of the car confirmed it was a major character in the film.

Muller offered that Jane had created what had now become one of his favorite noir scenes of all time. "You have to love it when you and Gina are in the parking lot of the rest stop and she complains, 'We've run over a guy. I've seen you murder somebody. We buried the body in the desert. All on our wedding day. It's not supposed to be like this!"

When Muller added that Dark Country was like "a comic book come to life", Jane was visibly pleased and admitted he loved hearing that because that was exactly what he wanted to create. He wanted the film to have that alternate reality comic book look without aping other comic adaptations like Dick Tracy (1990) or Sin City (2005). Though so many great comic book artists go unsung, they've influenced such well-known directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, among others, who have recognized the great shots to be gleaned from these graphics. "I stole as much as I possibly could," Jane confessed.

Pointing out that most people probably didn't know that Jane owned Raw Studios and was publishing comic books, he wondered who some of the unsung heroes were who influenced Jane? Jane recalled that his Dad bought him an issue of Mad Magazine when he was eight years old "and that was it." From there he made the leap to EC Comics. In the town where he grew up in Maryland there was a bookstore called Barbarian Books that was, in effect, his "home away from home". He had to walk sideways to make his way through overstuffed aisles. That was where he found all his EC reprints and Gladstone stuff and really got into "the joy and the art of the illustrated story." He fell in love with "the great beautiful world" of illustrators: Johnny Craig, Bernie Krigstein, Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, among so many others. Jane's concern is keeping this culture alive for upcoming generations. He fears we're losing this "great beautiful world" to video games but believes there's still room for inspiring people and "doing work that lives in your brain and affects the way you see the world." When he got turned on to Berni Wrightson, for example, he saw the whole world through Bernie's eyes for months. He would see a girl and wonder how Bernie would draw the seams and creases in her skirt or the veins in her hands.

The greatest influence on the film, however, was Thomas Ott's graphic novels, from which Jane admittedly lifted specific shots. Ott draws black and white stories without dialogue and his work resembles woodcuts or etchings. His framing in a story called Dead End in particular—which includes a long sequence of a guy driving through the desert—was a direct influence on Dark Country. To bring it full circle, Thomas Ott saw Dark Country and really liked it and—without knowing he was the inspiration—mentioned to Jane that he saw a lot of his own work in the movie. Jane asked him what he would think of doing a graphic novel adaptation of the film? Ott agreed to the suggestion, which Jane will put out through Raw Studios. On a recent trip to London Jane got together with Ott to take a look at the first pages and the experience was way too cool for him: he had envisioned Dark Country as a Thomas Ott novel and was now seeing it come to life through Ott's pen.

Before he discovered acting, Jane had drawn a lot in high school. He had wanted to be an illustrator but decided he'd get laid a lot more if he acted. Though he was good, he didn't have the necessary discipline, that "thing" that allows an illustrator to zone in and get lost in the work, which is what separates the men from the boys: that ability to "sit down, roll up your sleeves, and knock it out." Because he didn't have that, he knew he would never really be a great artist. Jane mollifed himself by considering he might paint when he becomes an old man.

Muller then invited Ray Zone to the stage and explained that Ray was responsible for setting the Castro screening of Dark Country into motion. Ray had attended some of the Noir City screenings in Los Angeles, met Muller, and they had talked about Inferno (1953) and I, the Jury (1953), early film noirs that experimented with 3D. Then Zone asked Muller if he had seen Jane's 3D neo-noir Dark Country? They came up with the idea of screening Dark Country at the Castro and filming the on-stage conversation in 3D as a DVD extra and—as if to prove the point—Zone arrived on stage with paddle balls so that he, Jane and Muller could bounce paddle balls at the 3D camera set up off stage. Of course this was in homage to another 3D movie from 1953, Andre de Toth's House of Wax, wherein a paddleball man offered one of the best examples of the 3D experience at the time. Andre de Toth didn't want to include the scene, felt it distracted from the main narrative, but was forced to include it by Jack Warner and other studio execs. Some consider House of Wax the best 3D movie of all time, Muller reminded, even though it was made by a filmmaker with one eye who had no depth perception whatsoever.

Jane quoted John Ford as saying that it's the mistakes that are often the most interesting parts of a movie. Ron Perlman's line about leaving "no turn unstoned" was an adlib. Ron—sloughing 90 pounds of make-up—had flown directly to New Mexico from the set of Hellboy 2 to shoot Dark Country.

Although Dark Country was set on a hot summer night in the desert, in reality they were shooting in November in New Mexico and it was "butt ugly cold." The ground was frozen rock hard. The actors had to use tricks like sucking on ice cubes before delivering lines so that their breath wouldn't vaporize. (Sucking on ice cubes gives an actor about 30 seconds where their breath doesn't show in cold air.) Hearing this made Muller appreciate the scene where Lauren German hangs her head out the window and moans, "It's soooooo hot." Jane recalled that German wore a tiny shift as thin as tissue paper during those cold night shoots. She was the smallest, thinnest person on the crew and was freezing. They had to to give her vitamin shots and fly her home to Los Angeles on the weekends to warm her up.

As for whether Jane would take on directing another 3D film? Absolutely. In the spirit of John Wayne's 3D western Hondo (1953), Jane would like to film a 3D gothic western, perhaps even a noir western. Ray Zone brought up that Raoul Walsh, another great noir director, also directed westerns that had dark tones. Wrapping up, Jane said that screening Dark Country in 3D on the Castro Theater's large screen was the pinnacle of his whole experience of making the film because it was the way the film was meant to be seen, by an audience who "got" it. He never thought the day would come. "I literally built this film for this audience in this theater," he beamed.

Muller admitted that hosting the Dark Country event was a crossroads for him in his career as the "Czar of Noir" because the entire event was digital. Earlier in the day, he had a conversation with a friend in the Castro about the future of 35mm film projection and how difficult it's becoming to get the studios to continue shipping 35mm prints. Three major studios—Warner Brothers, Paramount and Fox—are completely shutting down shipment of 35mm prints. Within the year, these studios will no longer allow Noir City to show their slate in 35mm. Noir City X (January 20-29, 2012) might possibly be the Film Noir Foundation's final 35mm-exclusive festival. It might certainly be the last time some of the films on the Noir City X program will be shown to the public in 35mm. "There's nothing anyone can do to stop this," Muller sighed. "The future is happening right now."

Muller qualified that—as long as they preserve a film somehow on film—then he can live with the changes to come. They can digitize the prints and make film trafficking wonderful and easy and all that but he insists they mustn't lose the film in the process while converting inventory over to new digital formats. There are certain titles that are becoming extinct because they are being ignored in the rush to digital. It's well-known that film remains the best medium for preserving film and that digital copies are too volatile, requiring migration from one form of storage to the next as hardware and storage systems change.