Arts & Events
Around & About the Movies: 13th Dark City Film Noir Festival Starts This Weekend
Noir City, the annual festival of film noir at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco will be running from this weekend through to next, January 16-25, with a dozen double (or triple) bills, priced at $10 per program—or a $120 "passport" for all programs, plus opening night reception with refreshments and entertainment at 6 p. m.
Eddie Muller, of Alameda, co-founder of the Film Noir Foundation, and his cohorts (notably, longtime Bay Area film programmer and Silent Film Festival director Anita Monga), building off last year's extraordinary festival of international film in and around the genre (with noirs from Argentina and Norway, for example), have crafted a festival around the darker side of matrimony as a theme, but with another roster of filmmakers that cineastes would think would be shown mainly archivally: Visconti, Ophuls, Clouzot, two Douglas Sirks (one with a Sam Fuller script), Joseph Losey, Nicholas Ray, Robert Wise's 'The Set-Up' (with Robert Ryan), Ida Lupino, Hitchcock ...
And two of the Foundation's restorations, one—'Woman on the Run'—declared by Muller to be maybe the finest location shooting of San Francisco of any film in the genre. (Indeed, a surprising number of the films to be screened—including the Nicholas Ray feature—were set and at least partly shot in the Bay Area, Monterey and elsewhere in Northern California.
It's a grand festival, a San Francisco institution—and one for thrill-seekers and connoisseurs of film alike!
