Noir City 9 shines spotlight on cinematic darkness

The American roots of film noir begin with the crime fiction that emerged during the 1930s from the pens of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and multitudes of lesser-known talents. In the wake of the Great Depression, these pulp authors reshaped the literary landscape with dark, cynical, morally ambivalent tales of crime, sex and vice — stories steeped in shadowy imagery, tough talk, and a hardscrabble hyper-realism that portrayed a brutal, hostile world. There were no heroes, only anti-heroes — self-preserving pragmatists whose cynicism was born of dashed hopes and faded ideals.

It was only a matter of time before these stories infiltrated Hollywood, merging with the stark, shadowy imagery of German Expressionism, which crossed the Atlantic along with the refugees who left Germany just ahead of Hitler's advancing stormtroopers. And thus a bold and distinctly downbeat genre was born, a German-American hybrid that introduced a stock of melodramatic characters: the dangerous and brooding urban gangster-villain; the tormented innocent caught up in nefarious circumstances beyond his control or comprehension; the icy, diabolical femme fatale; and an array of edgy protagonists ranging from the introspective, tormented, world-weary anti-hero to the twitchy, slippery, would-be hero, the third-rate, small-time hood looking to get ahead in a hostile world for which he is ill-equipped.

Noir City, the annual film festival that celebrates these dark cinematic gems and presents them on the big screen in all their tawdry glory, returns to San Francisco's Castro Theater this Friday with another 10-day program of dames, destruction and depravity. The festival is full of rarities; in fact, most of films in this year's program are not available on DVD.

The festival features 24 films, from A-list masterpieces to B-movie programmers, and kicks off at 7:30 p.m. Friday with Robert Taylor and Audrey Totter in Curtis Bernhardt's High Wall (1947), presented in a new 35-mm print preserved by the Film Noir Foundation. The double feature continues with Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a Peter Lorre film that some consider the first American noir.

Highlights include two classics from George Cukor: Gaslight (1944), starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, and A Double Life, with Ronald Colman's Oscar-winning performance as a Broadway actor slipping into madness; Strangers in the Night (1944), just one of director Anthony Mann's many great films; Marilyn Monroe as a mentally unstable babysitter who seduces Richard Widmark in Don't Bother to Knock (1952); Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), playing the role created by Agnes Moorhead in the original radio production that was one of the most famous broadcasts from that medium's golden age; and what noir festival would be complete without at least one Humphrey Bogart film? This year, it's The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), in which Bogart plays a mentally unhinged painter with murderous designs on his wife — Stanwyck again.

But the festival's best shows are often the lesser-known gems, pictures large and small that have, for one reason or another, slipped into semi-obscurity over the years.

Olivia de Havilland turns in two strong performances The Dark Mirror (1946), portraying identical twins caught up in a murder investigation. A psychologist aids in unravelling the crime by subjecting the sisters to the usual round of Rorschach tests, and though de Havilland ably delineates the sweet, kindly sister from the jealous and possibly dangerous one, director Robert Siodmak takes pity on the audience by giving the girls personalized necklaces that spell out their names in bold letters — it's as though Siodmak was taking advice from a bad editorial cartoonist.

Woman on the Beach (1947) was directed by the great Jean Renoir, yet the film was drastically cut before its release. Still, it's a strong enough little film, with Robert Ryan as the lovestruck innocent caught in the grip of seductress Joan Bennet. Like an apparition, she appears on the beach and before long Ryan has stepped into the role of savior, trying to free the distressed damsel from the clutches of her husband, an aging painter who has lost his sight, his muse, and, we're left to assume, his virility.

Joan Bennett appears again in a film by another festival regular, director Fritz Lang, whose German films exerted a strong influence on noir. In America, Lang's vision was curtailed, sometimes for the better, but oftentimes for the worse. With Secret Beyond the Door (1948), Lang had simply lost his mojo, spinning a nonsense tale of psychoanalytic babble while hoping his visual flair would carry the day. It didn't, but it's still an entertaining affair, with Bennet struggling to unravel the mysteries of Michael Redgrave's tormented psyche. The film will be presented in a new print restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, a project funded by Martin Scorcese's Film Foundation.

Noir City 9. Through Jan 30 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. For more information see www.noircity.com or www.thecastrotheatre.com.

Photo: Olivia de Havilland portrays identical twins caught in a murder investigation in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror (1946).

Two Gently Unfolding Dramas by Yasujiro Ozu

Almost from the beginning of the medium, filmmakers were eager to transcend the limits of traditional theater by putting the camera in motion, by sending it racing, swooping and soaring; by using a variety of lenses to shape the image, to magnify, distort and exaggerate; and by using the editing process to suggest, startle and surprise. And while some of the most exciting filmmakers over the past century have been those who found ways to employ these devices with flash and panache, one of the greatest directors the medium has ever produced was one who limited himself to the simplest and most austere techniques.

Yasujiro Ozu used his camera simply to observe his characters, to linger on their faces, their homes, their possessions—to look into the souls of everyday people under everyday circumstances. He was both a naturalist and a rigorous formalist, a director who sought to capture life as it is lived, but within a framework of rigidly defined restrictions. He limited the camera’s range of motion and the angles from which it could gaze; he limited his editing to simple, direct cuts—few dissolves or fades; and dialogue was conveyed in simple master shots followed by alternating close-ups. This artistic

code focused greater attention on content over form, allowing character to reveal itself, allowing dialogue to breathe, and allowing revelatory spaces to open up between words and gestures and characters. Thus relationships and motivations and plot points would gradually take shape before the viewer’s eyes.

Criterion has just released two rarely seen examples of Ozu’s mid-career work, The Only Son (1936) and There Was a Father (1942). The two films have many parallels, both tracking the relationship between a son and a single parent who must make great sacrifices for him.

In The Only Son, a mother lives a life of toil in order to send her son to college and eventually Tokyo, where she hopes he will rise in the world. When she is finally able to visit him, she is surprised to find that not only has he a wife and child, but a rather lowly job as a night school teacher. And the school teacher who had served as his mentor has fared no better in the big city; he runs a shabby restaurant, serving pork cutlets in a poor part of town. Mother and son spend several days together, for the most part avoiding the issues at hand. But there are two conversations in which these issues finally come to the service, and Ozu's muted approach captures the spoken and unspoken emotions that permeate the dialogue — disappointment, pride, shame, regret, love, resignation, dignity and acceptance.

There Was a Father stars Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryu as a man who seeks the best for his son, only to find that his decisions lead to their continual separation. This was a wartime film, and themes of duty and sacrifice were considered patriotic, lending the movie a political subtext, a rarity in Ozu's work. Far from the American form of propaganda film, in which virtuous leading men with broad shoulders committed acts of heroism on the front line while their pinup-worthy wives kept the home fires burning, Japanese propaganda featured a more quiet form of sacrifice, of fortitude and dutiful dedication to the nation's interests. There Was a Father shows that that dedication even trumps the father-son relationship, as Ryu consistently steers his son in directions that will make him most useful to Japan, even though it drives the two of them apart.

Ozu's work is almost literary, owing more to the novel than to film; his means of expression are subtle and powerful. His method for conveying the growing gap between father and son is to show the two fishing side by side. The camera watches from behind as the pair cast their lines over and over again in perfect unison. When the boy finally stops, the meaning and impact of the gesture is startling and poignant; there is no need to show tears or an exchange of words or glances.

Though he is often regarded as the most Japanese of Japanese directors, whose cinema captured unique and specific aspects of that nation’s life and culture, Ozu’s work easily transcends international boundaries, delving into character, relationships and commonplace issues to find the universal. His favored subjects include families and the relationships between generations; the aging process; city life versus rural life; and all the values that complement and conflict with one another in the ensuing drama: pragmatism and idealism, love and kindness, justice and forgiveness.

“Rather than tell a superficial story,” Ozu said, “I wanted to go deeper, to show ... the ever-changing uncertainties of life. So instead of constantly pushing dramatic action to the fore, I left empty spaces, so viewers could have a pleasant aftertaste to savor.”

Ozu's calm, gently unfolding dramas give us time to not only get to know his characters, but also deeply care about them — to enjoy their humor, to admire their strength and to forgive their transgressions — so that, when a film ends, there is often a feeling of regret that these characters are gone from our lives. “Every time I watch an Ozu film,” says actor Eijiro Tong, “I start to feel very sentimental as the end of the film nears. As I think back over the story, it’s like a flood of old memories washing over me, one after another.”

This is the essential sadness and loneliness that resides at the core of Ozu’s work — the awareness of the inevitability of change, and that beginnings are followed all too soon by endings.

The Only Son (1936) and There Was a Father (1942): Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu. 83 minutes; 87 minutes. www.criterion.com. Two-disc set includes essays by critic and historian Tony Rayns, an appreciation of Chishu Ryu by film scholar Donald Ritchie, comments by Ryu on Ozu, and video interviews with film scholars Tadao Sato, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up

It was with 1999’s Taste of Cherry that Abbas Kiarostami firmly cemented his international reputation, becoming the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival. But by then, his contemplative, intelligent films had been spurring debate in his home country for many years. Close-Up (1990), Kiarostami's emphatic declaration of Iranian cinematic artistry, looked back on cinema itself through a refracted lens, blending fiction, fact and fantasy into a story both stimulating and sad.

Close-Up was inspired by a news story Kiarostami read concerning Hossein Sabzian, an obsessive cinemaphile who impersonated Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and thereby insinuated himself into the life of a wealthy family, if only for a few days. Kiarostami then insinuated himself into Sabzian's trial, convincing the judge to not only allow the director to film the proceedings, but to question the defendant as the cameras rolled. The director also managed to persuade Sabzian and his victims to re-enact the story of their meeting and brief association, and then, upon Sabzian's release from jail, staged a meeting between the impersonator and the impersonated, with Mohsen Makhmalbaf carrying Sabzian on the back of his motorcycle to the home of his victims to ask for their forgiveness.The result is an examination of cinema and the troubled mind of a man who has devoted his life to a fanatic appreciation of the art. Close-Up, as with all of Kiarostami's best work, uses the drama and melodrama of everyday life to present his viewers with tantalizing, even baffling questions, and wisely leaves the answers to us.

Criterions' new DVD and BluRay editions of the film include audio commentary by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum; The Traveler, Kiarostami's first feature film; a documentary on Hossein Sabzian, six years after Close-Up; a new interview with Kiarostami; and A Walk with Kiarostami, a documentary portrait of the director by Iranian film professor Jamsheed Akrami.

1990. 98 minutes. $39.95. www.criterion.com.

Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich

Today, British director Carol Reed's reputation rests primarily on The Third Man, the 1950 post-war thriller in which Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles joined an international cast in the sewers of Vienna in the creation of a cinema classic. But Reed created at least two more masterpieces with The Fallen Idol and Odd Man Out, as well as a number of other fine but lesser-known films, produce both before and after his late '40s peak.

Night Train to Munich is a delirious ride, a curious hybrid of espionage thriller, Allied propaganda and screwball comedy, in which Nazis pursue a Czech scientist and his daughter from Prague to England to a precarious tram in the Swiss Alps. Rarely seen today, it was quite a success upon its release in 1940, its wry wit, sly sexual innuendo and absurdist cloak-and-dagger romance taking viewers on a stylish and ironic — if low-budget — tour through a series of genre conventions. Rex Harrison is suave and sarcastic, if a bit smarmy; Paul Henreid turns his heroic image on its head; and Margaret Lockwood maintains her beauty, humor and poise throughout a parade of plot twists.

Criterion's new DVD and BluRay editions of the film include an essay by film critic Philip Kemp and a conversation between film scholars Peter Evans and Bruce Babbington regarding Carol Reed, Night Train screenwriters, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, and the film's social and political context.

1940. 90 minutes. $29.95. www.criterion.com.

Mystery Train Explores a Mythic Memphis

Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train is a laconic journey, in three parts, through a Memphis of the imagination. Spurred by the passion and fury of a fierce backbeat, three interlocking deadpan vignettes find rock and roll pilgrims searching for something — the ghost of Elvis, the spirit of Carl Perkins, or a vague yearning for the vaguely defined essence of pompadoured rebellion — amid the empty streets and hollowed-out hotels of a faded town still trading on a brief epochal moment in its history. A young, star-struck Japanese couple, a rebel without a cause, and a comically stoic widow traverse the remnants of a mythic city in a mythic America in search of the reflected glory of the nearly mythic but everlasting moment of its ascendence. Screamin' Jay Hawkins, one of the real-life architects of rock and roll, takes a supporting role as an eccentric hotelier working the late shift.

Criterion's new DVD and BluRay editions of the film included a Q&A with Jarmusch; excerpts from the 2001 documentary Screamin' Jay Hawkins: I Put a Spell on Me; a documentary about the film's locations and the musical history of Memphis; and essays by Dennis Lim and Peter Guralnick.

1989. 110 minutes. $39.95. www.criterion.com.

Noir City Brings Cinema’s Dark Side to the Castro

An “eternal juvenile” no more, Dick Powell finally broke free of the battery of baby-faced roles he endured in a seemingly endless series of bright-eyed 1930s Warner Bros. musicals. With middle age fast approaching, Powell struggled to carve out a new identity for himself, jumping ship from one studio to another in search of a new career path.

Eventually he succeeded. Two examples of Dick Powell born again will screen this weekend as part of Noir City, the annual film noir festival at San Francisco’s Castro Theater. This year’s theme is “Lust and Larceny” and there is plenty of both throughout the 10-day series, which kicks off Friday with Pitfall, featuring Powell and Lizabeth Scott, and continues through Jan. 31. Powell appears again in Cry Danger, showing Saturday, Jan. 23.

In an effort to shed his boyish Warner Bros. image, Powell bought out his contract and signed with Paramount, only to bolt again when the studio denied him the lead in Double Indemnity. Soon enough Powell signed with RKO, and landed the plum role of shamus Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder My Sweet.

This breakthrough role was followed by more in the same vein: dark, hard-bitten dramas with a world-weary edge, a distinctly American genre to which French critics would ultimately give the name. Powell parlayed his second wave of cinematic success into a couple of radio gigs as well, including one of his signature characters, the private detective Richard Diamond. Powell was even secure enough by this point to include a nod to his earlier persona, finishing each episode by crooning a tune to his paramour.

It was at this time that Powell made one of his best, but least-known films, Cry Danger. Powell plays a sardonic, embittered ex-con, determined after five years in the pen to set a few things straight. Dry, drunken, down-on-his-luck Richard Erdman is along for the ride as a battle-scarred ex-Marine angling for a payday as reward for getting Powell out of prison.

Cry Danger showed at Noir City a couple of years ago, and though it was a murky 16-millimeter print—the only print available at the time—it was a crowd-pleaser. The evening was made all the more entertaining by the presence of Richard Erdman, who proved himself every bit the charismatic wisecracker even in his 80s. This year, the film screens in a brand-new 35-millimeter print, a rare opportunity to see this acerbic crime classic in peak condition.

In addition to Powell, this year’s program pays tribute to festival favorite Richard Widmark with a Jan. 29 double feature. Slattery’s Hurricane shows Widmark in one of his early leading roles, firmly

establishing the persona that would sustain him through several classics of the genre: tough, jaded, maybe a bit sleazy, but with a kind of weary decency waiting to shine through. Second on the bill is the Samuel Fuller noir masterpiece Pickup On South Street, with Widmark as an underworld conman, a pick-pocket who lives by his wits. Widmark seduces Jean Peters and plays the commies and the feds against each other while knocking back beers chilled in the icy waters beneath his shabby dockside shack.

The festival is full of rarities, films not available on DVD, many not available even on VHS. Another seldom-seen gem is Human Desire, one of director Fritz Lang’s better American films. Adapted from Emile Zola’s novel La Bete Humaine, Human Desire is a melodrama of love, lust and betrayal amid the freightyards of Philadelphia. Glen Ford plays a soldier just back from the Korean War who wants nothing more than to settle back into his life as a railroad engineer, with time to fish, catch a movie, or even step out with a nice girl, if he can find one. What he finds however is Vicky, played by perennial film noir femme fatale Gloria Grahame, whose marriage to Broderick Crawford is teetering on the edge of a spectacular collapse.

Lang had a checkered career in Hollywood, with neither the resources nor the autonomy he enjoyed in his pre-war German career. But Human Desire shows him in fine form, employing the intelligence and artistry that characterized his silent and early sound-era masterpieces. Long stretches pass artfully without dialogue, and the sights and sounds of trains, railroad tracks and freightyards are used to excellent effect, keeping the drama taut while filling the screen with compelling imagery.

Other highlights of the festival include Larceny, a dizzying melodrama of twists and turns centering around greed, corruption, and of course, dangerous dames; Marilyn Monroe in Niagara and Asphalt Jungle; A Place in the Sun, an adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; Escape in the Fog, in which a nurse is haunted by a dream of a murder committed on the Golden Gate Bridge; and an evening entitled “Bad Girls of Film Noir,” featuring “poor man’s Marilyn Monroe” Cleo Moore in a double bill of One Girl’s Confession and Women’s Prison.

Noir City

Friday, Jan 22 through Sunday, Jan 31 at the Castro Theater, San Francisco. www.noircity.com.

Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles

Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) covers one night in the lives of young Native Americans living in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill district. Mackenzie began interviewing a group of Indians in Los Angeles in 1956 and secured their support in producing an independent film that would provide a realistic portrayal of their community’s daily life. The film was completed in 1961 but has rarely been seen until its restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and its subsequent theatrical release by Milestone.

The Exiles follows a group of young Native American men as they essentially forsake their women for a night on the town, meeting up with friends at bars, cavorting with other women, venturing into the hills for drinking, drumming and fighting. They make their way along a circuit of Indian hangouts, small oases in a white man’s city where they can be together and, hopefully, left alone to be themselves. Meanwhile, a lonely wife goes to the movies and finally returns to the home of a friend so that she doesn’t have to sleep alone. In the morning she is able to watch as her husband and his friends finally stumble home drunk through the streets of Bunker Hill.

The rough, gritty, low-budget aesthetic recalls Shadows, John Cassavetes’ first film, set in New York. Both films feel loose and improvised, giving the impression of an authentic depiction of a place and time. And both focus attention on the cities themselves, using the urban landscapes as contexts for the lives of the characters, while also providing a sort of snapshot of a city at a particular point in time.

Milestone is a small company that picks and chooses its material, often sinking much of the company’s resources into a single theatrical and DVD release. The company is responsible for making some rare and important films available to the movie-going public, including I Am Cuba and Killer of Sheep—an impressive streak of significant releases that continues with The Exiles.

72 minutes. $29.95. www.exilesfilm.com. www.milestonefilms.com.

The Cinematic Poetry of Hiroshi Shimizu

Japanese director Hiroshi Shimizu, nearly unknown in the West, was a friend and sometime collaborator of his better-known contemporary Yasujiro Ozu.

The two share many qualities. Though their techniques differed, their themes were similar, and both evinced an uncommon compassion and abiding empathy for their characters.

Criterion has released a box set of four Shimizu films, none of which have appeared on DVD in this country before and only one of which has ever had much exposure on American movie screens. “Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu,” part of Criterion’s Eclipse line of DVD releases, is aptly named; not only does it refer to the fact that the director shot these films largely on location in the mountains and seaside towns of Japan, but it also calls to mind his distinctive and eloquent use of the traveling shot.

Shimizu’s camerawork is not technically complex—it usually involves simple movements forward or backward or from side to side—but it is employed so artfully and with such grace that his moving camera speaks volumes about his narrative, his characters and his perspective.

Like Ozu, Shimizu uses simple and very direct techniques to convey so much more than script or image can suggest. His style is almost Hemingwayesque in that he imbues the most elementary building blocks of his artistic language to suggest a vast world of emotion, humanity and depth. He employs his camera the way a poet chooses just the right word, a simple word, and emphasizes it with a sharp, poignant delivery.

Shimizu’s work is deceptively slight; he strikes a delicate balance between pathos and lighthearted entertainment. His films are full of wit, intelligence and an overwhelming sense of compassion. He views his characters with patience and wholly without judgment, using landscape and setting—dappled light, swaying branches, timelessly pastoral meadows, bridges over gentle but relentless streams—to convey their dilemmas, perspectives and personalities.

Mr. Thank You (1936) may be the most accessible and pleasing of the set’s four films. It features an effective motif, first introduced as comedy but employed with greater poetry and depth as the story develops. A bus driver traverses the same landscape each day, transporting rural folks to the big city and back. As pedestrians and bicyclists step aside to let his bus pass along the narrow mountain roads, he tips his hat and cheerfully calls out “Thank you,” earning him his affectionate nickname. The film gradually becomes more thoughtful, and even, in small ways, political, as Shimizu moves us gently from a lighthearted travelogue to a sociological examination of Depression-era Japan.

Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933), the only silent film in the collection, is something of a melodrama, but again with a light touch, tracing a love triangle that contains disaster, tragedy, redemption and ambivalence.

In The Masseurs and a Woman (1938), the traveling shot is again deployed. The film opens with the camera retreating before two blind hikers, masseurs on their way to seasonal work at a mountain spa. The two converse like characters from a Beckett play, talking of nothing on the way to nowhere.

Gradually something of a plot unfolds, though it is a slight one. Characters, each with his or her own brand of loneliness, interact at the spa, seeking connections with one another, like ghosts grasping for something tangible to hold onto. It is a Winesburg, Ohio-like poem of emptiness, with people tentatively reaching out but pulling back for fear of...what? Rejection? Success? Disappointment? Vulnerability? The specifics of their lives are withheld; details about the woman at the center of the intrigue are only slowly revealed. Another traveling shot depicts her from the point of view of one of the blind masseurs: he senses her nearby as she passes him on the street, a ghostly, mysterious and tremendously sensual presence—a woman simultaneously earthy and real but slightly beyond reach, a romantic and erotic dream, a scent, a gentle breeze, a feeling that can’t quite be pinned down.

Ornamental Hairpin (1941) bears resemblance to Ozu’s film, especially his early work, in that it depicts multiple generations and stages of life in one dense milieu—from the boredom of children who have exhausted the pleasures of games, to love burgeoning among the young, to pragmatic middle age, to the wisdom and weariness of old age, as well as its poignant regression in the form of an old man who is as eager for a game of Go as the children are for any game at all. And the middle-aged bear the brunt of both, sandwiched between the demands of their children and parents.

The film also contains perhaps Shimizu’s most effective and devastating use of the traveling shot. You can see it coming in the final minutes as Shimizu beautifully establishes the themes of his closing sequence. A young woman retraces her steps through fields and streams and groves, the backdrops of a now-concluded romance. We have watched as she aided a young soldier in his recovery from an injury, helping him to take small steps one at a time until he could walk again without crutches. Her sentimental journey takes her across a narrow bridge across a stream, through a meadow and into a grove of trees, her face always obscured by a white parasol. Finally she comes to the foot of the stairwell that served as the final test of the soldier’s recuperation. The angle of the parasol changes and her face is revealed, looking up toward Shimizu’s camera as it patiently waits for her to begin her ascent. And when she does, Shimizu cuts to a view from the side, the camera tracking with her one step at a time as she begins the hard climb of her own recovery from wounds less visible but no less crippling.

Newspaper Noir: San Francisco's Noir City 7

The struggle of World War II and the triumph of its conclusion brought to the silver screen a vision of a nation bold and patriotic, wholesome and optimistic. From propaganda films to brassy celebratory musicals, Hollywood’s program of A-list releases rolled out a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked presentation of Norman Rockwell’s America.

But there was another side to the story.

Not everyone could forget the horrors of war, could ignore the blood and mud stains of battle, could wipe away the imagery of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Many found it impossible to simply lay down their weapons and retire to the suburbs; for them the terror of the war lingered, and in Hollywood that creeping malaise manifested itself in the form of an anxious, fearful and pessimistic cinema—the stuff of B movies.

More than a decade later the French would give a name to it: film noir. But in America, during the genre’s heyday of the 1940s and ’50s, it had no name. Crime dramas, they were simply called, but it went deeper than that. The urban angst that was allowed no expression in the can-do spirit of mainstream film gave rise to a genre that went beyond mere crime in the depiction of a pervasive moral corruption and a spiraling spiritual decay. Living in the shadow of the Holocaust and under the cloud of imminent nuclear annihilation, there were, as William Faulkner once said, no longer problems of the spirit but only the question: When will I be blown up?

Noir City, the San Francisco film festival that celebrates this era of cinematic darkness, perversity and mayhem, presents its annual 10-day orgy of angst beginning this Friday at the Castro Theater. The festival screens a double bill every day through Feb. 1.

The stark, gloomy, high-contrast imagery of noir came from overseas, carried across the Atlantic by filmmakers who left Germany just ahead of Hitler’s stormtroopers. The expressionism of 1920s and ’30s German cinema, replete with its shadows, darkness, and undercurrents of psychic decay, infiltrated the Hollywood studio system and merged with the American gangster genre of tough-talking wise guys inspired by the pulp fiction of the 1930s. This hybrid genre introduced a stock of dramatic characters: the dangerous and brooding urban gangster-villain; the tormented innocent caught up in nefarious circumstances beyond his control or comprehension; the icy, diabolical femme fatale; and an array of edgy protagonists ranging from the introspective, world-weary anti-hero—think Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep—to the twitchy, slippery, would-be hero, the third-rate, small-time hood looking to get ahead in a hostile world for which he is ill-equipped—think Richard Widmark in Night and the City.

Eventually the netherworld of noir infiltrated the A list, its blackness spreading like spilled ink on porous newsprint. Billy Wilder, one of the many European refugees who worked in the genre, perfected it with the star-studded Double Indemnity (1944), and the style became so prevalent and nearly respectable that only a few years later, in 1950, Wilder saw fit to take it down a peg, satirizing noir and Hollywood itself with impish glee in Sunset Boulevard.

Noir City impresario Eddie Muller has crafted another program of classics and rarities, cleverly centered for maximum publicity on a theme guaranteed to bring him plenty of ink: “Newspaper Noir.” For with newspapers themselves currently immersed in their own noirish melodrama—jobs on the line and the fate of the medium in doubt—what film critic could resist a chance to wallow in that uncertainty by delving into Muller’s festival of fear and loathing?

For beleaguered journalists, the pleasures are many, beginning with the temptation to indulge in the nostalgic fantasy of the old-school newspaperman, a gumshoe reporter gazing skeptically from beneath the brim of a jaunty fedora, coldly examining the facts through the drifting smoke of an angled cigarette. No white-collar J-school grad, he; his sleepless nights are spent roaming rain-soaked streets and decadent nightclubs, trash-strewn alleys and cut-rate motels—places where anything can happen, and often has, just before he arrives. But enough of romance; the flip side of this coin is a dose of hard-boiled reality served with a dash of existentialist nightmare, as the modern-day journalist is more akin to Widmark than Bogart—cowering, doomed and anxiety-ridden, forever on the run from controlling forces poised to dispense a fate worse than a pink slip.

The festival begins with the former. Deadline USA (1952) is a bold and elegiac story of old-school journalistic integrity. Editor Bogart battles the avarice and ignorance that leads two spoiled and spiteful heiresses to put his paper on the block, and worse still, to sell it to an unworthy, scandal-mongering competitor who doubtless intends to bolster his own tawdry tabloid by closing down the competition. It’s a familiar story here in the Bay Area as the MediaNews chain has gobbled up a string of once-proud papers, large and small, to encircle the metropolis with a newspaper empire that consolidates its profits in Denver by cutting local staff and starving its newspapers of news. As rumors circulate about an impending MediaNews takeover of the only remaining Bay Area prize, the ailing San Francisco Chronicle, and as publicly traded corporations continue to run the nation's smaller independents out of business, Deadline USA only gains in relevance.

The festival closes with a look at the underbelly of the news world with the classic Clifford Odets-penned Sweet Smell of Success (1957), in which Burt Lancaster, as gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, toys with Tony Curtis in a demonstration of the heady abuse of power acquired through the pen. And between there are several more classics—including The Killers (1946), another Lancaster vehicle—but many more rarities, most not available on DVD, including Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and While the City Sleeps (both 1956), two wrongly neglected noirs by another towering figure of German cinema, Fritz Lang, whose early work was instrumental in shaping the genre.

Occasionally the selections veer slightly from newspapers into other media. The Unsuspected (1947), for example, stars Claude Rains as a radio personality who manages to maintain his celebrity as those around him begin to mysteriously die off. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian director best known today for Casablanca (1942), and scored by German émigré Franz Waxman, the film is produced with a deft touch, including a lovely expressionist motif in which the killer’s reflection, upside down and ominous, always appears just as he commits his crime, drifting into focus in the glass top of a table or in the black wax of a record—a succinct visual cue that the world is out of kilter.

Desperate (1947), a quick and dirty thriller, features the always suave and menacing Raymond Burr tracking innocent Steve Brodie to exact revenge over the execution of Burr’s hoodlum brother. Director Anthony Mann sets the tone in the first few minutes with a classic mise en scene that shows a darkened gangster hideout illuminated only by a swinging lamp, set into motion by the flailing arms of man sent flying with a right hook from Burr’s ruthless gangster.

Noir City 7. Friday, Jan. 23, through Sunday, Feb. 1 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.noircity.com.

Touch of Evil: Three Versions of an Orson Welles Masterpiece

Textual authenticity is a central issue in the work of Orson Welles. The director saw so many of his films altered in the editing room by his producers that only a few of his completed pictures can be said to fully represent his original intentions. 

This has made the prospect of releasing "restorations" of Welles' films on DVD a bit complicated. Some of his pictures exist in multiple versions; some exist only in a single, bastardized version; and many of his films were never completed at all. 

The Criterion Collection set the standard for Welles releases a couple of years back with the company's three-disc set of Mr. Arkadin. There was no single version of that film that could be said to represent the director's original vision, so Criterion released all of them, including a "composite" version which attempted to recreate the film according to written evidence and best guesses as to the director's intent. None of these versions are the final word; Criterion simply put all the material out there for viewers to make of it what they will. 

Universal's new 50th anniversary edition of Touch of Evil follows this model, and the two-disc set is precisely the sort of release that is sorely needed for the Welles canon. Containing all three extant versions of the film, it provides an excellent perspective on the shape and scope of this 1958 noir masterpiece. 

Among the many Welles films that were altered and re-edited without his consent, Touch of Evil might be said to have fared the best, or perhaps suffered least. The studio-sanctioned version, released in 1958, was a lesser film than what Welles had intended, but studio interference could not subdue or destroy the power of Welles' imagery and narrative. 

However, years later, a longer cut was found, and for decades this version supplanted the original version, as it was believed to be at least slightly closer to Welles' intent. 

In 1998, Rialto released a new version, re-edited in accordance with a 58-page memo Welles sent to Universal after having previewed the studio's truncated version of his film. The restoration was not a "director's cut," for Welles never completed his own final cut before the studio removed him from the project. Nor was Welles' memo a plea to return entirely to his original design. Welles' memo took into account new footage shot by the studio without his involvement, dismissing some of it yet praising some of it as well. The memo was essentially an attempt at cooperation and diplomacy, saying to the studio, "Given what we have now, here's how we can make this a great picture." 

The restored version is, for the most part, a significant improvement. Welles' editing patterns were restored, including his elaborate cross-cutting between two story lines; the score and soundtrack were reshaped in accordance with his requests; and the credits were moved from the opening sequence to the end, offering an unobstructed view of one of the most spectacular opening shots ever filmed. 

Critics still found plenty wrong, suggesting that the pacing in the second half of the film was too slow. Some preferred one of the previous versions to the new, but until now the restoration was the only version available on DVD. 

To finally be able to see all three side by side, to compare the repercussions of every edit and adjustment, is a gift for Welles fans. Hopefully similar releases will follow, with multiple versions of his landmark works: Hamlet and Othello, both before and after their soundtracks were altered; The Stranger and Lady From Shanghai, with descriptions, stills, storyboards and shooting scripts to explain Welles' original visions for those films and how they were dramatically cut and reshaped by his producers; and perhaps one day someone will finally discover missing footage of The Magnificent Ambersons, and we may perhaps get an approximation of the masterpiece that might have been. 

Universal's Touch of Evil stands in contrast to Image Entertainment's release of Welles' unfinished opus, Don Quixote, which offers a 1992 recreation — a purely hypothetical one — of what Welles intended with this highly amorphous project. 

It is not Image's fault that so little of Welles' Quixote footage is available. The company has endeavored to present us with what is essentially the only available home video release of Quixote, and there is merit in that. But what's available is, unfortunately, a butchered and largely discredited restoration project undertaken by a one-time Welles associate who had nothing to do with this particular film. 

Don Quixote was indeed a quixotic adventure for Welles, a project he worked on for decades. He was questioned about it so often he threatened to release it under the title When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote? It still isn't quite certain if he ever intended to finish Quixote. Writers and painters have works they keep for themselves, he once said; why not filmmakers? 

Shot independently and often on the fly over many years, Welles outlived the two principal actors—Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff—and in fact, never had a final script. The film was largely improvised, using available locations, actors and conditions to fashion his narrative. 

In 1992, Jess Franco, who served as an assistant to Welles on Chimes at Midnight, obtained as much Quixote footage as he could, re-recorded much of the dialogue and music, and edited the footage into something resembling a film. Though there are many excellent shots and scenes, and plenty of evidence of good performances and dialogue, the result is not the least bit impressive. 

The odds were against Franco, but indeed the odds were so bad that there was really no reason to go through with the project. Legal battles kept him from obtaining much of the footage, including perhaps the most arresting scene—available for viewing on YouTube—of Quixote in a movie theater, drawing his sword and stepping up to rescue a celluloid maiden by slashing the screen to ribbons. Without the film's most innovative and famous scene, how could any completed version claim relevance? 

But even without these omissions, the project should not have been attempted. After all, Welles himself claimed that he kept the footage scattered in various storage facilities to prevent a project like this one from being attempted without his consent. He didn't want some hack to try to assemble this, his most cherished and personal film, into some dim-witted, half-formed movie. His was a unique and idiosyncratic vision that could not be replicated, even with the best of intentions. 

One day perhaps this film too will be given a decent DVD release. Done properly, it would simply gather all the existing footage like a documentary, grouping scenes for clarity but otherwise with no attempt to structure it as a narrative. It wouldn't make for a great commercial success certainly, but rather it would present us with something of a historical document, allowing us to see Don Quixote as it exists — as a mass of footage lovingly shot but never fully edited. In other words, leave the incomplete film incomplete and let us imagine, as we must with so many of Welles' films, what might have been. 

Touch of Evil (1958). 95 minutes / 109 minutes / 111 minutes. Universal. $26.99. 

Orson Welles' Don Quixote (1992). 115 minutes. www.image-entertainment.com. 

Widescreen Suspense: Kurosawa's High and Low

Akira Kurosawa, more than any other filmmaker, is strongly associated with the samurai genre. And with a body of work that includes Yojimbo, Sanjurio, Throne of Blood, Rashoman, Seven Samurai and Ran, it is certainly understandable. But Kurosawa was not limited to period pictures.

High and Low, Kurosawa's gripping adaptation of a novel by Ed McBain, could be called a genre masterpiece, and yet it is hardly limited to any particular genre. Tense psychological drama gives way to police procedural which in turn gives way to noirish, expressionist melodrama.

The film begins with a long sequence that never ventures outside the protagonist's home. Toshiro Mifune is introduced as business tycoon Kingo Gondo, and quickly enough the plot develops — a child has disappeared, though as it will turn out, it is not the right child. An unknown kidnapper seeks ransom from Gondo but has accidentally abducted the child of Gondo's chauffeur. No matter — the extortion plan will continue as planned.

What follows is an extended sequence of beautiful widescreen compositions within a room full of people — Gondo, his wife and chauffeur, and a bevy of policeman on the case. Kurosawa choreographs a tour de force of shifting compositions as actors move across the space, their relationships and dilemmas exemplified as they turn toward and away from each other, move forward and recede and traverse the wide frame, crossing, blocking and boxing each other in.

A moral dilemma is being systematically examined here, and Kurosawa sticks with it, milking every bit of tension, every scheming angle to full effect. It is a dilemma of some complexity: Is one child more valuable than another? Is a child's life worth a man's dreams and goals and wealth? Can Gondo be expected to throw away the dreams of a lifetime with no certainty of recompense, or of even of getting the child back? Kurosawa fills the frame with people, using his camera to make their relationships manifest. And the panoramic view of the city from Gondo's house on a hill reminds us of his vulnerability. The man who once seemed to stand above the city like a lord is now held captive by an unseen enemy below; the house on the hill is no longer a watchtower, but a cage that can be assaulted from any angle.

To this point the film has essentially been a chamber piece, but once Gondo makes the decision to pay the ransom the film leaps into action with a breathtaking sequence aboard a train. Kurosawa insisted on a real train, with real cramped passenger cars and real scenery rushing past. He used eight cameras to capture the action almost entirely in real time. The result is a stunning sequence of taught action, compelling drama and unyielding suspense. And once the sequence comes to its emotional conclusion, at the film's one-hour mark, it is the end of a chapter and the beginning of what amounts to an entirely new film.

In the next hour High and Low becomes a gripping police procedural, following investigators as they follow leads and report their findings. Their excursions into the field are interspersed like flashbacks much like in Fritz Lang's M. Gondo slips out of the spotlight as the plot shifts to the battle between the police inspector and the kidnapper, one dedicated to ensuring Gondo's sacrifice doesn't go unavenged, and the other bent on the great tycoon's destruction.

Kurosawa maintains the tension throughout, as clues unravel into facts and facts lead to the criminal. Credulity may be strained slightly with the police delay the kidnapper's capture in order to hit him with more serious charges, resulting in a death, but the film never lets up. And once he is apprehended, the film once again adopts another tone, delving further into social commentary as the kidnapper and Gondo confront one another before the window slams shut and the film comes to an end.

High and Low (1964). 143 minutes. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com.

Cinematic Haiku: An Autumn Afternoon

By contrast with the dynamic action of his better known contemporaries, Yasujiro Ozu sought to minimize the kinetic drama of his films. Ozu does not reach out and grab ahold of the viewer with startling compositions and frenetic movement; he holds his camera still and makes the viewer come to him. 

Ozu's style is like haiku. His imagery, his characters and dialogue are stripped to their essence; performances are purged of nuance, of subtley and naturalism, reduced to precise movements. Endless takes where the director chiseled away at his actors' mannerisms might have resulted in stilted performances, but instead Ozu and his company produce pure, streamlined poetry. Like the decor and architecture surrounding them, the actors are spare and minimalist by design, and Ozu uses similarly spare and minimalist camerawork to film them, keeping his camera as still, as zen-like and as patient as he asks his actors and his audience to be. 

The reticence of his characters and the austerity of his style may leave the impatient viewer a bit restless. The first 20 minutes or so of an Ozu film may seem both slow and confusing as characters are introduced almost in mid-conversation. Ozu doesn't insert clumsy expository introductions into his characters' mouths to help orient the viewer. Instead he thrusts us directly into the scene and allows relationships and connections to gradually become clear. On the surface it may appear that we are simply listening in on a series of polite conversations, broken up here and there by a few of Ozu's characterisitic transition shots — still life images of rooms, hallways, furniture, streets and buildings. But situation piles upon situation and character upon character until a full and rich world has been created, almost imperceptibly, and suddenly it dawns on us that not only do we know these characters, we care about them and have somehow become invested in them. 

This is not the identification that comes from cheap pandering or directorial manipulation, from simpering, soft-focus close-ups or crescendos of tear-jerking orchestral notes; it is instead the measure of Ozu's artisanship, of his unique talent for rendering a film with the depth of a novel — his ability, as both a writer and director, to fully and eloquently express the thoughts, dreams, emotions and desires of his characters to the point that we cannot help but take an active interest in their welfare. 

An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu's final film, reflects his late-career interest in the shift to post-war modernity. Japan's increasingly Americanized culture is a central issue in the director's later work, with new attitudes, priorities and interests widening the gap between old and young, between parents and their adult children. The nation's newfound prosperity simultaneously enriches, distracts and destroys the lives of the middle class; wealth purchases convenient appliances and luxury goods but opens the door to the creeping malaise of materialism and threatens to undermine the old social order. 

An Autumn Afternoon dwells on a theme he had worked before, that of a parent facing the unwelcome decision to marry off a daughter and thus embrace a new life without her presence. Ozu's films often deal with such generational issues, of the young leaving behind the aged. It is one of several themes that he returned to in film after film throughout his career, using different characters and situations to more fully examine the complexity of the issues at hand. It is a common joke that Ozu's films are essentially interchangeable, in style, in theme, and in the similarity of their titles: Early Spring, Late Spring, Late Autumn, Autumn Afternoon, etc. And while there is some truth in that observation, once you immerse yourself in Ozu's world you see that though nearly all of his films share a certain aesthetic, they are remarkably distinct from one another, each as rich, as engaging, as distinct as the faces of the actors he photographed. 

Criterion has released many of Ozu's films on DVD over the years, both in stand-alone editions and in the more recent line of Eclipse box sets. The "Silent Ozu" collection presented three of his early silent family comedies, and "Late Ozu" presented five of his late-career films. But Criterion did not include An Autumn Afternoon in that collection, opting instead to release it as a separate title. It was a good decision. While all of Ozu's later films are excellent, An Autumn Afternoon is essentially the culmination of a directorial style that evolved over several decades. The spaces Ozu leaves between scenes and between characters are deftly handled, wistful and open-ended; his compositions are as balanced and precise and idiosyncratic as ever; his use of color bold yet understated, with blacks and whites offset by strategic dashes of red; and his everyday themes as sincere, as universal, and as heartrending as the medium will allow. 

An Autumn Afternoon (1962). 113 minutes. $29.95. Criterion Collecton. www.criterion.com. 

Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women

Director Kenji Mizoguchi secured his international reputation in the early 1950s with such films as Sansho the Bailiff, The Life of Oharu, and Ugetsu. His output was prolific and varied, but the plight of women was a recurring interest throughout his career, with many of his films centered on strong, resilient women characters. 

Criterion has released "Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women," a box set in the company's Eclipse series that features four films that focus on the plights of women among the lower strata of Japanese society. 

The set includes two of Mizoguchi's early sound films (Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, both from 1936), a mid-career gem (Women of the Night, 1948) and the great director's final film (Street of Shame, 1956). All use the topic of prostitution to examine the hardships faced by women in a patriarchal society that renders them helpless without the aid of men. 

Sisters of the Gion follows two sisters and their vastly different approaches to life and their profession. Omocha (Isuzu Yamada) is ruthless, manipulative and grimly pragmatic, determined to use whomever she can to claw her away above her meager station. Her bold, gritty crassness calls to mind Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers from the 1934's Baby Face. Omocha's sister Umekici (Yoko Umemura) is far more fatalistic, resigned to her station in life. Neither approach works out too well in the end as the women are still unable to get ahead and are finally reduced to despair. 

Mizoguchi's final film, Street of Shame, was originally to be shot with a documentary approach, taking his camera and crew to the Yoshiwara, Edo's red-light district. However, ongoing political battles seeking to ban prostitution made brothel owners wary of participating in a project that would bring them unwanted attention at a sensitive time, forcing Mizoguchi to return to the studio. 

Street of Shame tracks the lives of five prostitutes at a brothel called Dreamland. Again, one is manipulative and ruthless; Yasumi lends money to her colleagues at ever-increasing interest rates, and entices a young, lovestruck businessman to embezzle from his employer with the false hope that she will one day marry him. Mickey, a brash young beauty who dresses like a 1950s American high school girl, has sought the geisha life as an almost welcome reprieve from life under the oppressive reign of a neglectful and possibly abusive father. Yorie clings to the idea of marriage as her salvation, but when she finally takes the plunge she finds she has only escaped into a life of loveless drudgery. Hanae has a young child and an unemployed husband and is thus the only breadwinner in the family. When her husband attempts suicide, she tackles him and hits him, demonstrating with her wordless fury that his supreme act of self-pity would have rendered moot the enormity of her sacrifice. Yumeko left the country to work as a prostitute in order to support her son, hoping that he would be able to support her when he grew to manhood. Now a young man, the son comes to the city to inform his mother that he will be taking a job at a factory, but when he learns how she has been supporting him over the years, he turns on her. 

Street of Shame was a commercial success and a few months after its release, prostitution was outlawed in Japan, with many attributing at least some of the credit to Mizoguchi and his final film. 

Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women. $59.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com. 

Osaka Elegy (1936). 71 minutes. 

Sisters of the Gion. (1936). 69 minutes. 

Women of the Night. (1948). 74 minutes. 

Street of Shame. (1956). 85 minutes. 

Vampyr: The Indelible Imagery of Carl Th. Dreyer

Ten years after the release of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), the first and greatest of all vampire films, Carl Th. Dreyer released Vampyr (1932), the next great vampire film, and one that took the genre in a new direction. Vampyr is the vampire film reduced to its essence, to an unrelenting flow of eerie imagery, off-kilter camera movements and a hushed soundscape consisting of sparse, enigmatic dialogue and a muted, foreboding score. Less plot than impressionist montage, the film is an almost surrealist blend of unexplained actions and haunted faces. Imagine Dracula as presented by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. 

Criterion has released the film in a two-disc DVD set, complete with bonus features that include an interview with Dreyer, a commentary track, and a book containing the original script and the novella on which Dreyer claimed the film was based—though the final product bears little resemblance to its source. 

The film itself looks superb, though it is still not quite the film Dreyer would have wanted us to see. It’s a sound film—the director’s first—produced in several different languages. Dreyer shot Vampyr silent, his actors reading the lines in several languages and later synching the different scores for release in various countries. However, the only version that currently exists in a form suitable for restoration is the German, and thus we are left with something he tried mightily to avoid: his mesmerizing images are overlaid with the distraction of subtitles. Still, given the fate of other Dreyer films, we’re lucky to have any version at all. 

At the time, Vampyr seemed a most unlikely project for Dreyer. While it was certainly within reason to expect another masterpiece from this uncompromising filmmaker, Dreyer isn’t the first name that comes to mind when discussing the horror film. After all, this was the man who made The Passion of Joan of Arc just a few years earlier, a powerful and uncompromsing avant garde film that to this day remains one of cinema’s artistic masterpieces. 

Dreyer made just 14 films in his career and no two of them alike, altering his style and approach, often radically, to fit his subject matter. He began his career in the silent era in his native Denmark, creating several well-regarded works before venturing into the greater European film industry in search of more plentiful resources and increased autonomy. One of his films from this era, Mikaël (1924), a German production that showed at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival, is considered one of the landmarks of early gay cinema. 

But nothing in that oeuvre would quite prepare a viewer for what came next. 

Dreyer went to France to make a film based on the trial of Joan of Arc. Joan had only recently been sainted after centuries of excommunication, and though the French were eager to see a film about her, they were more than a little chagrined to find the task handed over to a Dane, and the role of Joan given to an Italian. Rene Falconetti was a stage actress and a very successful one; The Passion of Joan of Arc would be her first and only screen appearance, and thus for decades she has been associated in the public mind with this role, a stunning performance of grace, passion, dignity and sorrow. 

Stylistically, it is a radical departure, not just from Dreyer’s previous work, but from virtually anything that came before it. Dreyer relied almost exclusively on close-ups and text to tell the tale, relegating the vast sets to relative obscurity, only allowing them to be glimpsed in a few sequences. The film was a commercial failure, and was recut and altered into many different forms, depending on the prevailing political forces in whichever county it was being presented in. The original negative was lost to fire, and Dreyer re-composed the film from alternate takes; that version too was lost to fire. For decades Passion then was considered lost forever, with no surviving prints of Dreyer’s original film known to exist, until one was accidentally discovered in 1986 in a supply closet in a Norwegian mental institution. 

After observing the fate of Passion, Dreyer sought a bit less controversial and more commercially viable project for his next film, and settled on horror as a genre which was not only popular, but conducive to artistic independence; horror films of the silent era had managed to go relatively untouched by censors while remaining uncompromising in artistic merit. 

The result is a moody, atmospheric film modeled on the horror genre but more restrained, more obscure and more elliptical in its examination of terror, mystery and the occult. Dreyer’s expressive camera work involves wonderfully disorienting movements that shuttle the camera from one indelible image to another. As the camera circles around rooms, the lens distorts the field of vision, causing walls to appear to shift and move, leaving the viewer at all times on uneven ground, with little in the plot or in the visual terrain to anchor oneself. This is not your typical horror film; it is a dreamlike and hallucinatory experience that is content to leave much of its mystery unresolved. 

Consecutive commercial failures left Dreyer unemployed for more than a decade afterward, either unwilling or unable to mount another production. He returned in 1943 with Day of Wrath, followed by Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964), all of which, along with The Passion of Joan of Arc, are also available in Criterion editions. 

Vampyr (1932). 75 minutes. $39.95. Criterion. www.criterion.com. 

Anthony Mann's The Furies

Ambition, deception, manipulation and dispossession: The Furies (1950), Anthony Mann's genre-defying noir-epic-western-melodrama, has enough treachery and love and treacherous love to fill several pictures. 

Mann brought everything he had learned during his apprenticeship in the world of noir — even his cinematographer — to this, one of his first forays into the western, a genre to which he had long aspired. Also completed and released that same year was Winchester '73, one of the more famous and accomplished of Mann's westerns, and the first of many collaborations with Jimmy Stewart. 

Winchester '73, along with Mann's later westerns, especially the ones featuring Stewart, has long overshadowed The Furies. And while there may be plenty of justification for that fact — Mann having matured greatly as a director over time — The Furies does not deserve to be overlooked. For while it is certainly a flawed film, it has more than its merits: fascinating dynamics, superb photography, and excellent performances by Walter Houston and Barbara Stanwyck, two formidable actors at the peak of their talents in their portrayal of a father-daughter relationship so Freudian that it borders on incest. 

Houston, in his final screen appearance, delivers a delightfully hammy portrayal of a ham-fisted tycoon, a lordly lord of the manor forever seeking to re-establish his prowess and power. Houston plays it for all it's worth, making his T.C. Jeffords into a brawling blowhard, full of bluster and braggadocio. As with his celebrated role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Houston manages to walk the line of histrionic bombast without quite slipping into caricature, rendering Jeffords by turns a tyrant and a fool, but always a man—human, humane and fallible. 

Stanwyck is at her steely, brassy best as Jeffords' daughter, a wild, tempestuous siren of a tomboy and heiress to his sprawling New Mexico ranch. Stanwyck manages once again to defy her era's gender stereotypes; her Vance Jeffords is strong-willed, wily and tough as the rugged landscape she oversees. And yet her beauty, sensuality and charismatic self-confidence, even arrogance, make her as alluring as any eye-batting southwestern belle. 

The bond between father and daughter is as sexual as it is familial, and as ruthless as it is tender. T.C. and Vance admire each other with a curious gleam in their eyes, looking upon each other with equal parts fascination and wariness. The proud T.C. does not want to give up an inch of his domain, while Vance is eager to prove herself every bit as much a ruthless tycoon as her father by taking over his role. Mann squares them off in face-to-face compositions, each leaning toward the other in shots that convey both aggression and love. T.C. is frequently pictured in his office, where mounted bull horns on the wall perch just above his head, signaling both his swaggering arrogance and his susceptibility to the feints and jabs of the stoic Rip Darrow, played by Wendell Corey with the haughty stillness of a matador. 

Criterion has given the film the full treatment, with an excellent (if phallic symbol-obsessed) commentary by film historian Jim Kitses, and a pressing of the novel by Niven Busch on which the film was based. 

The Furies (1950). 109 minutes. Criterion Collection. $39.95. www.criterion.com.