This year’s roster of crime-soaked films was perhaps the most socially-conscious yet.
The beauty of every Noir City, as well as probably the best representation of the Film Noir Foundation itself, is how each year the retrospective film festival wonderfully combines classic noir favorites with a number of selections which have been so carefully and lovingly restored, in many cases by the organization themselves. This year was no exception as the festival once again made its way to the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz in Austin for a weekend of tales rich with mystery and darkness, each one a treasured standard or an instant new favorite. The Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake classic The Blue Dahlia, for example, was followed by the little-seen I Walk Alone, which featured the formidable presence of both Burt Lancaster AND Kirk Douglas.
It has always been the case that while some past Noir City Austins have had a theme (the 2015 fest for example featured a tribute to the adapted works author Cornell Woolrich), most of the titles have been selected for a variety of attributes ranging from the talent involved to a film’s recent rediscovery. Yet this year’s crop seemed to dig further in terms of the kind of ideology that was present in the various sorts of characters who populated each film. Throughout the weekend, FNF Founder and President Eddie Muller and Director Alan K. Rode introduced a series of films which offered up a unique spin on ideas of social standing and financial prosperity in the noir realm. In their own ways, each one spoke to the significance of such motifs in the film noir landscape and just how far certain characters were willing to go to both achieve and protect them.
One of the recurring motifs at this year’s Noir City Austin was the symbolism behind a person’s social position and reputation in the city and the panic it causes when the fear of having it stripped away becomes real. In The Unsuspected, Claude Rains, a famous and acclaimed radio show host, has killed his secretary and finds himself going to any length necessary to cover up his crime. Although his main goal is to avoid a murder charge, there’s a sense that the protection of his professional name is just as (if not more) important. A similar case is played out in the Loretta Young vehicle The Accused. When Dr. Wilma Tuttle (Young), a psychology professor, kills a student as a means of self-defense, she spends the next several days trying to distance herself from any form of suspicion, even going so far as to enter into a romance with the student’s guardian (Robert Cummings). While her actions and motives are justified, it’s easy to spot the desperation of a woman whose identity is tied up in a position not held by many of her sex, as well as the fierce determination to make sure it remains intact.
An even more telling offering in this vein was the deceptively complex Lee J. Cobb-starring The Man Who Cheated Himself. In the film, Cobb plays a seasoned police detective who puts everything on the line when he agrees to help his socialite mistress (Jane Wyatt) cover up her husband’s murder. While the film looks and feels like a standard (yet wholly enjoyable) B-movie, The Man Who Cheated Himself intelligently explores the notion of credibility and the extremely thin line between reputable and despicable in the noir world. Seeing how Cobb is willing to risk his name while doing anything he can to hold onto it proves a study in the mores of the era. It’s the division between law and order in that film, as well as the vast amount of grey between the two, which plays out so tellingly as career and identity become hopelessly tangled.
On a sort of flip side, there is the matter of class and status which flowed through a number of titles played out over the weekend. In the aforementioned I Walk Alone, Lancaster’s reformed criminal Frankie has just been recently released from prison only to find his former partner (Douglas) living the life of a powerful nightclub owner. It’s here where the different faces of crime (the gangsters of the prohibition era and the suit-wearing thugs of the following decade) come to blows, with the only common denominator being the image of wealth as the ultimate lifeline. Even darker, yet more poetic, was The Underworld Story. Starring Dan Duryea (in a rare leading role), the film saw the actor play a ruthless reporter who takes over a local town’s paper just as a black maid is being accused by a wealthy family for the murder of one of their own. As The Underworld Story’s protagonist, Duryea begins the film as money-hungry and morally-challenged as can be until he realizes that what he’s engaged in is a clashing of cultures with the wealthy victim’s loved ones in essence expecting their mess to be cleaned up for them. Ultimately the film becomes a lesson in just what exactly constitutes a good name in society.
As the festival’s final selection, Roadblock certainly boasted the most symbolic title of all the films screened in this story of an insurance investigator (Charles McGraw) who falls in love with a social-climbing model (Joan Dixon), whose desperation for sure-fire prosperity ends up infecting him as well. It’s appropriate that Roadblock was saved as Noir City Austin’s festival closer, as few other movies are able to better illustrate the common man’s striving for a life that’s beyond unreachable in the world of film noir. It’s the hunger to attain it and the means to make it come to life which inevitably leads to the downfall of the film’s genuinely likable protagonist who, like so many, tried to have it all. If there would be three elements which would describe the unquenchable thirst among the majority of the characters in these films, they would undoubtedly have to be respect, indulgence, and the realization of just how easy it is to fall from one world into the other.
The richness of every lineup the FNF creates for Noir City can be found in how each one illustrates the trappings of such a specific world. While this year’s bill was certainly no different, the majority of the films managed to pinpoint a kind of through line amongst them. In their own way, all the titles are takes of people trying to exist and thrive in a post-war society. These films serve as a reaction to a future ripe with uncertainty and how the frantic and fractured nature of characters’ mindsets react to it. If indeed there is one unifying force which bands all these men and women together, it’s definitely that primal and instinctual need to find a way to exist in the world of noir just long enough to emerge from it unscathed.
For more about the Film Noir Foundation, including information about their quarterly magazine, ways of donating and other Noir City stops, please visit their website: http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/home.html
