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10/7/2014

Lady in the Dark

The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA, New York

NEW YORK, June 12, 2014–The Museum of Modern Art’s Lady in the Dark: Crime Films from Columbia Pictures, 1932–1957 salutes Columbia Pictures through atmospheric whodunits and moody noir films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The series, which runs from July 11 through August 4, 2014, includes both celebrated A-level productions like Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946) and Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1948)—both centered on Columbia’s biggest star, Rita Hayworth— and outstanding examples of the B-pictures that were the studio’s real specialty, among them rediscoveries like Robert Gordon’s Blind Spot (1947) and Seymour Friedman’s Chinatown at Midnight (1950). A selection of episodes from the haunting Whistler series, each starring Richard Dix as a different figure marked by fate, offers a taste of the many lower-budget franchises that kept the studio’s lot humming. Lady in the Dark is organized by Dave Kehr, Adjunct Curator, and Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Lady in the Dark opens with a rare 35mm print of S. Sylvan Simon’s I Love Trouble (1947), an early example of genre self-consciousness, written by the prolific Roy Huggins. The screening is introduced by Eddie Muller, founder and president of The Film Noir Foundation. Franchot Tone stars as the hapless private detective Stuart Bailey (a character revived by Huggins for his 77 Sunset Strip television series), who spends much of the movie being knocked out—literally or figuratively—by a stunning series of late-1940s bombshells. Among the more well-known films in the exhibition, Gilda (1946) features Rita Hayworth’s performance as the erotic, unattainable femme fatale, trapped in a ménage à trois with brooding sadist Glenn Ford and chilly German casino owner George Macready in Buenos Aires. Costume designer Jean Louis is said to have used John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X as the inspiration for the black gown in which Hayworth famously performs her sly striptease “Put the Blame on Mame.”

The Lady of Shanghai (1947), directed by Orson Welles and shown from a new 4K digital restoration, showcases Rita Hayworth as the seductive Scheherazade who entangles naïve Irish sailor Welles in romantic intrigue, an insurance scam, and murder. Baroque set pieces on a yacht (on loan from Errol Flynn for the production), in a Chinese opera theater, and, most famously, in a funhouse hall of mirrors give Welles free rein with deep-focus, chiaroscuro photography, optical distortions, and shock editing.

A B-movie with A-class ambitions, Joseph H. Lewis’s So Dark the Night (1946)—a psychologically tinged whodunit—stars Austro-Hungarian émigré Steven Geray as a famously obsessive, overworked Parisian detective who falls for an innkeeper’s daughter while on holiday. Onthe night of their engagement, she and another suitor, a young farmer, mysteriously disappear, leading to a string of perplexing murders. Lewis uses window frames and mirrors, restricted camera movements, deep focus, and shadowy, destabilizing shots to give an increasingly sinister cast to the bucolic landscape—a cinematic feat, given that he and cameraman Burnett Guffey transformed the ragged Columbia backlot into an authentic French countryside without ever once having stepped foot in France. Lewis’s My Name is Julie Ross—an unexpected hit for Columbia in 1945—was among the first of many postwar films to blend the fatalism of film noir with the sentiment of gothic romance. Nina Foch, in her breakthrough role, plays a lonely young woman who accepts a job as a private secretary to a wealthy old woman—only to wake up one morning to find herself a prisoner of her employer’s softly menacing son.

In 1944, Columbia adapted The Whistler, a CBS radio program that featured an anthology of suspense tales narrated with bitter irony by the title character—a mysterious figure with access to the inner workings of fate—for a series of B movies. Columbia made the premise even more Kafkaesque by casting the fading star Richard Dix as a different character in each film. The first episode, 1944’s The Whistler, was directed by young Columbia recruit William Castle and stars Dix as a businessman who, crushed by guilt over the accidental death of his wife, hires a hit man to take him out of his misery. Lady in the Dark also features The Power of the Whistler (1945), Mysterious Intruder (1946), and The Secret of the Whistler (1946)—the sixth of the Whistler films, which stars Dix as an aging trophy husband and strenuously “modern” artist. While waiting for his wealthy wife to die, he becomes infatuated with a heartless model. Director George Sherman stages the indoor action as if he were covering an outdoor spectacle, in grand, sweeping panning shots that seem to whip the characters toward their fate.

Special thanks to Grover Crisp, Executive Vice President of Asset Management, Film Restoration and Digital Mastering at Sony Pictures; Rita Belda, Executive Director, Asset Management, Sony Pictures; and Christopher Lane, Worldwide Repertory Sales Manager, Sony Pictures Releasing. All prints and DCPs courtesy Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Screening Schedule
Lady in the Dark: Crime Films from Columbia Pictures, 1932–1957
July 11–August 4, 2014
All films preserved by Sony Pictures Entertainment in 35mm, except where noted.

Friday, July 11

7:00
I Love Trouble. 1947. USA. Directed by S. Sylvan Simon. Screenplay by Roy Huggins. With Franchot Tone, Janet Blair, Janis Carter. This is a rare 35mm print of a seldom-seen gem, an early example of genre self-consciousness written by the prolific Roy Huggins. Franchot Tone stars as the hapless private detective Stuart Bailey (a character revived by Huggins for his 77 Sunset Strip television series), who spends much of the movie being knocked out, literally or figuratively, by a stunning series of late 1940s bombshells. 93 min. Introduced by Eddie Muller, Founder and President, The Film Noir Foundation

Saturday, July 12

2:30
Chinatown at Midnight. 1949. USA. Directed by Seymour Friedman. Screenplay by Robert Libott, Frank Burt. With Hurd Hatfield, Jean Willes, Tom Powers, Ray Walker. This standard-issue police procedural, directed with crisp impersonality by Columbia contract director Seymour Friedman, is hugely enlivened by a spectacularly creepy performance from Hurd Hatfield (The Picture of Dorian Gray) as a soulless, sexually ambiguous killer preying on the antique dealers of San Francisco’s Chinatown. 66 min.

4:30
Blind Spot. 1947. USA. Directed by Robert Gordon. Screenplay by Martin Goldsmith, based on the story by Harry Perowne. With Chester Morris, Constance Dowling, Steven Geray. Aging matinee idol Chester Morris stars as a vividly alcoholic author of pulp novels who falls under suspicion when his penny-pinching publisher is murdered by a method described in one of his stories. This casually sordid, micro-budgeted noir features some inventive staging by the director Robert Gordon and a rare sympathetic performance by professional femme fatale Constance Dowling. 73 min.

6:30
In a Lonely Place. 1950. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Andrew Solt, Edmund H. North, Dorothy B. Hughes. With Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Jeff Donnell. Humphrey Bogart is the hard-drinking, hot-tempered screenwriter Dixon Steele, whose history of violence toward women makes him a prime suspect when a hat check girl of his (brief) acquaintance turns up dead. This classic film noir was also a painfully personal cri de coeur on the part of the director Nicholas Ray, who placed much of the action on a set duplicating Ray’s own Hollywood home and cast his then-wife, Gloria Grahame, as an actress who comes to Steele’s defense, only to discover his destructive impulses for herself. 92 min.

Sunday, July 13

2:30
By Whose Hand? 1932. USA. Directed by Ben Stoloff. Screenplay by Harry Adler. With Nat Pendleton, Barbara Weeks, Tom Dugan. A night train to San Francisco provides the closed setting for this action-packed thriller, which combines a murder mystery—with pretty much every passenger on the train having good reason to kill the multiply despicable victim—with wild action, as an escaped convict (Pendleton) kills the engineer and sends the train careening out of control. It’s up to wisecracking reporter Ben Lyon to tame the chaos and win the girl. 63 min.

4:30
The Ninth Guest. 1934. USA. Directed by Roy William Neill. Screenplay by Owen Davis, Garnett Weston. With Donald Cook, Genevieve Tobin, Edwin Maxwell. With a premise that anticipates Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None—eight disparate characters are lured to an art deco penthouse, where they are locked in and assassinated one by one—this tidy little programmer was directed with wit and precision by Neill. 65 min.

Monday, July 14

5:00
The Whistler. 1944. USA. Directed by William Castle. Screenplay by Eric Taylor. With Richard Dix, Gloria Stuart, J. Carrol Naish. “I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night . . .” So began the CBS radio program that ran from 1942 to 1955, an anthology of suspense tales narrated with bitter irony by the title character, a mysterious figure with access to the inner workings of fate. Adapting the program for a series of B movies, Columbia made the premise even more Kafkaesque by casting the fading star Richard Dix as a different character in each film. In this first episode, directed by the young Columbia recruit William Castle, Dix is a businessman who, crushed by guilt over the accidental death of his wife, hires a hit man to take him out of his misery. But one thing the Whistler knows is that his wife is alive. 59 min.

6:45
The Big Heat. 1953. USA. Directed by Fritz Lang. Screenplay by Sydney Boehm. With Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin, Jocelyn Brando. Lang’s classic was one of the first films noir to take the genre out of the shadows and into the crisply sunlit world of 1950s suburbia. Glenn Ford is the maverick cop who, out to avenge the death of his wife, finds himself battling not an abstract notion of fate, but an all too concrete conspiracy of politicians and racketeers. With Gloria Grahame as the moll of a gangster (Marvin), who gives as good as she gets. 88 min.

Tuesday, July 15

5:00
The Power of the Whistler. 1945. USA. Directed by Lew Landers. Screenplay by Aubrey Wisberg. With Richard Dix, Janice Carter, Jeff Donnell. The third film in Columbia’s Whistler series finds Richard Dix as an amnesiac wandering the streets of Greenwich Village. Janis Carter is the good-hearted young woman who takes pity on him and—big mistake—decides to find his true identity. A powerfully conveyed sense of claustrophobia and pervasive cruelty makes this one of the most distinctive films of its director, Lew Landers, a B-movie stalwart with close to 150 features to his credit. 66 min.

6:30
Let Us Live. 1939. USA. Directed by John Brahm. Screenplay by Anthony Veiller, Allen Rivkin. With Henry Fonda, Maureen O’Sullivan, Ralph Bellamy, Alan Baxter. Henry Fonda is in his saintly, everyman mode as a taxi driver whose plans to marry a waitress (a radiant Maureen O’Sullivan) are undone when eyewitnesses mistakenly identify him as a killer. Directed with inventive visual flourishes by the émigré filmmaker John Brahm (The Locket), Let Us Live reflects the socially conscious influence of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once while providing one likely source for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1957 The Wrong Man. 68 min.

Wednesday, July 16

5:00
Mysterious Intruder. 1946. USA. Directed by William Castle. Screenplay by Eric Taylor. With Richard Dix, Barton MacLane, Regis Toomey, Nina Vale. This Whistler entry (the fifth) finds Richard Dix ostensibly on the side of the law, as an opportunisticprivate detective playing the angles in a case involving a missing heiress and a cache of precious Jenny Lind recordings. 62 min.

6:45
I Love Trouble. 1947. USA. Directed by S. Sylvan Simon. Screenplay by Roy Huggins. With Franchot Tone, Janet Blair, Janis Carter. This is a rare 35mm print of a seldom-seen gem, an early example of genre self-consciousness written by the prolific Roy Huggins. Franchot Tone stars as the hapless private detective Stuart Bailey (a character revived by Huggins for his 77 Sunset Strip television series), who spends much of the movie being knocked out, literally or figuratively, by a stunning series of late 1940s bombshells. 93 min.

Friday, July 18

5:00
The Secret of the Whistler. 1946. USA. Directed by George Sherman. Screenplay by Richard H. Landau, Raymond L. Schrock. With Richard Dix, Leslie Brooks, Mary Currier. The sixth and probably best of the Whistler films stars Dix as an aging trophy husband and strenuously “modern” artist. While waiting for his wealthy wife to die, he becomes infatuated with a heartless model (Leslie Brooks). Director George Sherman stages the indoor action as if he were covering an outdoor spectacle, in grand, sweeping panning shots that seem to whip the characters toward their fate. 62 min.

6:45
Let Us Live. 1939. USA. Directed by John Brahm. Screenplay by Anthony Veiller, Allen Rivkin. With Henry Fonda, Maureen O’Sullivan, Ralph Bellamy, Alan Baxter. Henry Fonda is in his saintly, everyman mode as a taxi driver whose plans to marry a waitress (a radiant Maureen O’Sullivan) are undone when eyewitnesses mistakenly identify him as a killer. Directed with inventive visual flourishes by the émigré filmmaker John Brahm (The Locket), Let Us Live reflects the socially conscious influence of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once while providing one likely source for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1957 The Wrong Man. 68 min.

Saturday, July 19

2:30
The Whistler. 1944. USA. Directed by William Castle. Screenplay by Eric Taylor. With Richard Dix, Gloria Stuart, J. Carrol Naish. “I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night . . .” So began the CBS radio program that ran from 1942 to 1955, an anthology of suspense tales narrated with bitter irony by the title character, a mysterious figure with access to the inner workings of fate. Adapting the program for a series of B movies, Columbia made the premise even more Kafkaesque by casting the fading star Richard Dix as a different character in each film. In this first episode, directed by the young Columbia recruit William Castle, Dix is a businessman who, crushed by guilt over the accidental death of his wife, hires a hit man to take him out of his misery. But one thing the Whistler knows is that his wife is alive. 59 min.

4:15
The Power of the Whistler. 1945. USA. Directed by Lew Landers. Screenplay by Aubrey Wisberg. With Richard Dix, Janice Carter, Jeff Donnell. The third film in Columbia’s Whistler series finds Richard Dix as an amnesiac wandering the streets of Greenwich Village. Janis Carter is the good-hearted young woman who takes pity on him and—big mistake—decides to find his true identity. A powerfully conveyed sense of claustrophobia and pervasive cruelty makes this one of the most distinctive films of its director, Lew Landers, a B-movie stalwart with close to 150 features to his credit. 66 min.

6:15
The Big Heat. 1953. USA. Directed by Fritz Lang. Screenplay by Sydney Boehm. With Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin, Jocelyn Brando. Lang’s classic was one of the first films noir to take the genre out of the shadows and into the crisply sunlit world of 1950s suburbia. Glenn Ford is the maverick cop who, out to avenge the death of his wife, finds himself battling not an abstract notion of fate, but an all too concrete conspiracy of politicians and racketeers. With Gloria Grahame as the moll of a gangster (Marvin), who gives as good as she gets. 88 min.

Sunday, July 20

2:30
Mysterious Intruder. 1946. USA. Directed by William Castle. Screenplay by Eric Taylor. With Richard Dix, Barton MacLane, Regis Toomey, Nina Vale. This Whistler entry (the fifth) finds Richard Dix ostensibly on the side of the law, as an opportunistic private detective playing the angles in a case involving a missing heiress and a cache of precious Jenny Lind recordings. 62 min.

4:30
The Secret of the Whistler. 1946. USA. Directed by George Sherman. Screenplay by Richard H. Landau, Raymond L. Schrock. With Richard Dix, Leslie Brooks, Mary Currier. The sixth and probably best of the Whistler films stars Dix as an aging trophy husband and strenuously “modern” artist. While waiting for his wealthy wife to die, he becomes infatuated with a heartless model (Leslie Brooks). Director George Sherman stages the indoor action as if he were covering an outdoor spectacle, in grand, sweeping panning shots that seem to whip the characters toward their fate. 62 min.

Monday, July 21

4:30
In a Lonely Place. 1950. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Andrew Solt, Edmund H. North, Dorothy B. Hughes. With Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Jeff Donnell. Humphrey Bogart is the hard-drinking, hot-tempered screenwriter Dixon Steele, whose history of violence toward women makes him a prime suspect when a hat check girl of his (brief) acquaintance turns up dead. This classic film noir was also a painfully personal cri de coeur on the part of the director Nicholas Ray, who placed much of the action on a set duplicating Ray’s own Hollywood home and cast his then-wife, Gloria Grahame, as an actress who comes to Steele’s defense, only to discover his destructive impulses for herself. 92 min.

6:45
Blind Spot. 1947. USA. Directed by Robert Gordon. Screenplay by Martin Goldsmith, based on the story by Harry Perowne. With Chester Morris, Constance Dowling, Steven Geray. Aging matinee idol Chester Morris stars as a vividly alcoholic author of pulp novels who falls under suspicion when his penny-pinching publisher is murdered by a method described in one of his stories. This casually sordid, micro-budgeted noir features some inventive staging by the director Robert Gordon and a rare sympathetic performance by professional femme fatale Constance Dowling. 73 min.

Tuesday, July 22

4:30
Chinatown at Midnight. 1949. USA. Directed by Seymour Friedman. Screenplay by Robert Libott, Frank Burt. With Hurd Hatfield, Jean Willes, Tom Powers, Ray Walker. This standard-issue police procedural, directed with crisp impersonality by Columbia contract director Seymour Friedman, is hugely enlivened by a spectacularly creepy performance from Hurd Hatfield (The Picture of Dorian Gray) as a soulless, sexually ambiguous killer preying on the antique dealers of San Francisco’s Chinatown. 66 min.6:30 The Sniper. 1952. USA. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Screenplay by Harry Brown. With Adolphe Menjou, Arthur Franz, Marie Windsor, Richard Kiley. Giving a fine performance as the improbably named police lieutenant Frank Kafka, Adolphe Menjou joins forces with a sympathetic psychologist (Kiley) in pursuit of a sexually frustrated laundry driver (Franz) who can’t help gunning down pretty brunettes on the panicked streets of San Francisco. The Sniper represents a major step forward in the evolution of the serial killer archetype, building on Chinatown at Midnight and other films toward its ultimate expression in Psycho. 88 min.

Wednesday, July 23

4:30
The Ninth Guest. 1934. USA. Directed by Roy William Neill. Screenplay by Owen Davis, Garnett Weston. With Donald Cook, Genevieve Tobin, Edwin Maxwell. With a premise that anticipates Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None—eight disparate characters are lured to an art deco penthouse, where they are locked in and assassinated one by one—this tidy little programmer was directed with wit and precision by Neill. 65 min.

6:15
By Whose Hand? 1932. USA. Directed by Ben Stoloff. Screenplay by Harry Adler. With Nat Pendleton, Barbara Weeks, Tom Dugan. A night train to San Francisco provides the closed setting for this action-packed thriller, which combines a murder mystery—with pretty much every passenger on the train having good reason to kill the multiply despicable victim—with wild action, as an escaped convict (Pendleton) kills the engineer and sends the train careening out of control. It’s up to wisecracking reporter Ben Lyon to tame the chaos and win the girl. 63 min.

Friday, July 25

4:30
Escape in the Fog. 1945. USA. Directed by Budd Boetticher (credited as Oscar Jr.). Screenplay by Aubrey Wisberg. With Nina Foch, Otto Kruger, William Wright. Boetticher’s wartime spy thriller pleasurably mixes Freudian pop psychology, supernaturalism, and tradecraft. A battle-scarred Navy nurse, awakening from a nightmare in which a man is about to be murdered on the Golden Gate Bridge, finds the mysterious stranger standing at the foot of her bed. Very quickly they become enmeshed in a nasty bit of international espionage involving fifth columnists, double agents, and an extremely well-placed MacGuffin. 65 min.

6:30
The Burglar. 1957. USA. Directed by Paul Wendkos. Screenplay by David Goodis. With Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield, Martha Vickers, Mickey Shaughnessy. Pulp existentialist David Goodis brings his own crime novel to the screen in classic hardboiled fashion. A botched jewel heist sparks sexual tension, incestuous childhood guilt, and treachery among thieves and crooked cops—and who can blame them, with voluptuous Jayne Mansfield at the center of it all? The Burglar represents a transitional, self-reflexive noir made at the twilight of the studio system in the late 1950s. 90 min.

Saturday, July 26

2:30
Walk a Crooked Mile. 1948. USA. Directed by Gordon Douglas. Screenplay by George Bruce, based on a story by Bertram Millhauser. With Louis Hayward, Dennis O’Keefe, Raymond Burr. Investigating the murder of an FBI agent and a security breach at a secret Southern California defense facility, a Scotland Yard detective and a square-jawed G-Man are led to a communist spy ring operating out of San Francisco.Walk a Crooked Mile is an early example of Red menace noir: Cold War crime films that urgently uncovered a vast Soviet conspiracy within our sacred American institutions. 91 min.

4:45
Drive a Crooked Road. 1954. USA. Directed by Richard Quine. Screenplay by Blake Edwards. With Mickey Rooney, Diane Foster, Kevin McCarthy. Shaking off his countless prewar roles as an American innocent, baby-faced Mickey Rooney plays a lovelorn garage mechanic and amateur racing enthusiast who finds himself seduced by a gangster’s moll into driving the getaway car after a Palm Springs bank robbery—only to turn the tables when he realizes he’s been duped. This sun-drenched noir, one of Rooney’s favorites, demonstrates the actor’s range and subtlety. 83 min.

6:45
The Reckless Moment. 1949. USA. Directed by Max Ophuls. Screenplay by Henry Garson, Robert Soderberg, based on the story “The Blank Wall.” Ophuls’s last American film stars a never-better Joan Bennett as an upper-middle-class housewife who believes that her daughter has committed a murder and anxiously conceals the body. James Mason is the small-time blackmailer who seeks to exploit the situation, only to fall for her. Burnett Guffey’s creeping crane shots and chiaroscuro lighting are perfectly keyed to Ophuls’s brilliant, amoral critique of bourgeois family life and class ambition. 82 min.

Sunday, July 27

2:00
Murder by Contract. 1958. USA. Directed by Irving Lerner. Screenplay by Ben Simcoe. With Vince Edwards, Philip Pine, Herschel Bernardi. Vince Edwards plays a Melvillian contract killer who executes his assignments with ruthless, Zen-like efficiency, using any potential weapon at hand, while still finding time to take in the tourist sites around town. Unsurprisingly, his fatal flaw is his wary distaste of women, particularly the one he’s hired to kill. Irving Lerner’s perversion of the postwar American Dream—Claude wants to settle down in a humble riverside cottage, and sees his line of business as the swiftest means to that end—resembles the tarnished aspirations of so many Nicholas Ray and Martin Scorsese antiheroes. 81 min.

4:00
So Dark the Night. 1946. USA. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Screenplay by Martin Berkeley, Dwight V. Babcock, based on a story by Aubrey Wisberg. With Steven Geray, Micheline Cheirel, Eugene Borden. A B-movie with A-class ambitions, Lewis’s psychologically tinged whodunit stars Austro-Hungarian émigré Steven Geray as a famously obsessive, overworked Parisian detective who falls for an innkeeper’s daughter while on holiday. On the night of their engagement, she and another suitor, a young farmer, mysteriously disappear, leading to a string of perplexing murders. Lewis uses window frames and mirrors, restricted camera movements, deep focus, and shadowy, destabilizing shots to give an increasingly sinister, almost schizoid cast to the bucolic landscape—all the more impressive given that he and cameraman Burnett Guffey transformed the ragged Columbia backlot into an authentic French countryside without ever once having stepped foot in France. 71 min. Digital projection.

6:00
My Name Is Julia Ross. 1945. USA. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Screenplay by Muriel Roy Bolton. With Nina Foch, Dame Mae Whitty, George Macready. An unexpected hit for Columbia in 1945, Julia Ross was among the first of many postwar films to blend the fatalism of film noir with the sentiment of gothic romance. Nina Foch, in her breakthrough role, is the lonely young woman who accepts a job as a private secretary to a wealthy old woman (Whitty) but wakes up one morning to find herself a prisoner of her employer’s softly menacing son (Macready, working his way toward his unforgettable performance in Gilda). The veteran B director Joseph H. Lewis films with unrestrained noir panache, creating dense patterns of shadow and wildly distorted spaces. 65 min.

Monday, July 28

4:30
Drive a Crooked Road. 1954. USA. Directed by Richard Quine. Screenplay by Blake Edwards. With Mickey Rooney, Diane Foster, Kevin McCarthy. Shaking off his countless prewar roles as an American innocent, baby-faced Mickey Rooney plays a lovelorn garage mechanic and amateur racing enthusiast who finds himself seduced by a gangster’s moll into driving the getaway car after a Palm Springs bank robbery—only to turn the tables when he realizes he’s been duped. This sun-drenched noir, one of Rooney’s favorites, demonstrates the actor’s range and subtlety. 83 min.

6:45
Walk a Crooked Mile. 1948. USA. Directed by Gordon Douglas. Screenplay by George Bruce, based on a story by Bertram Millhauser. With Louis Hayward, Dennis O’Keefe, Raymond Burr. Investigating the murder of an FBI agent and a security breach at a secret Southern California defense facility, a Scotland Yard detective and a square-jawed G-Man are led to a communist spy ring operating out of San Francisco. Walk a Crooked Mile is an early example of Red menace noir: Cold War crime films that urgently uncovered a vast Soviet conspiracy within our sacred American institutions. 91 min.

Tuesday, July 29

4:30
My Name Is Julia Ross. 1945. USA. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Screenplay by Muriel Roy Bolton. With Nina Foch, Dame Mae Whitty, George Macready. An unexpected hit for Columbia in 1945, Julia Ross was among the first of many postwar films to blend the fatalism of film noir with the sentiment of gothic romance. Nina Foch, in her breakthrough role, is the lonely young woman who accepts a job as a private secretary to a wealthy old woman (Whitty) but wakes up one morning to find herself a prisoner of her employer’s softly menacing son (Macready, working his way toward his unforgettable performance in Gilda). The veteran B director Joseph H. Lewis films with unrestrained noir panache, creating dense patterns of shadow and wildly distorted spaces. 65 min.

6:15
The Reckless Moment. 1949. USA. Directed by Max Ophuls. Screenplay by Henry Garson, Robert Soderberg, based on the story “The Blank Wall.” Ophuls’s last American film stars a never-better Joan Bennett as an upper-middle-class housewife who believes that her daughter has committed a murder and anxiously conceals the body. James Mason is the small-time blackmailer who seeks to exploit the situation, only to fall for her. Burnett Guffey’s creeping crane shots and chiaroscuro lighting are perfectly keyed to Ophuls’s brilliant, amoral critique of bourgeois family life and class ambition. 82 min.

Wednesday, July 30

6:45
Dead Reckoning. 1947. USA. Directed by John Cromwell. Screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett, Steve Fisher. With Humphrey Bogart, Lizabeth Scott, Morris Carnovsky, Wallace Ford. A returning war hero (Bogart) investigates the sudden disappearance of a paratrooper buddy who’s been accused in a crime of passion, only to get drawn intoa Florida Gulf love triangle involving Coral Chandler (Scott), a husky-voiced cabaret singer who harbors deadly secrets, and a smarmy casino owner named Martinelli (Carnovsky). Lizabeth Scott may have been no Lauren Bacall, but John Cromwell and Humphrey Bogart seem to be having fun quoting earlier noirs like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. 100 min.

8:30
The Sniper. 1952. USA. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Screenplay by Harry Brown. With Adolphe Menjou, Arthur Franz, Marie Windsor, Richard Kiley. Giving a fine performance as the improbably named police lieutenant Frank Kafka, Adolphe Menjou joins forces with a sympathetic psychologist (Kiley) in pursuit of a sexually frustrated laundry driver (Franz) who can’t help gunning down pretty brunettes on the panicked streets of San Francisco. The Sniper represents a major step forward in the evolution of the serial killer archetype, building on Chinatown at Midnight and other films toward its ultimate expression in Psycho. 88 min.

Thursday, July 31

4:30
So Dark the Night. 1946. USA. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Screenplay by Martin Berkeley, Dwight V. Babcock, based on a story by Aubrey Wisberg. With Steven Geray, Micheline Cheirel, Eugene Borden. A B-movie with A-class ambitions, Lewis’s psychologically tinged whodunit stars Austro-Hungarian émigré Steven Geray as a famously obsessive, overworked Parisian detective who falls for an innkeeper’s daughter while on holiday. On the night of their engagement, she and another suitor, a young farmer, mysteriously disappear, leading to a string of perplexing murders. Lewis uses window frames and mirrors, restricted camera movements, deep focus, and shadowy, destabilizing shots to give an increasingly sinister, almost schizoid cast to the bucolic landscape—all the more impressive given that he and cameraman Burnett Guffey transformed the ragged Columbia backlot into an authentic French countryside without ever once having stepped foot in France. 71 min. Digital projection.

6:30
Escape in the Fog. 1945. USA. Directed by Budd Boetticher (credited as Oscar Jr.). Screenplay by Aubrey Wisberg. With Nina Foch, Otto Kruger, William Wright. Boetticher’s wartime spy thriller pleasurably mixes Freudian pop psychology, supernaturalism, and tradecraft. A battle-scarred Navy nurse, awakening from a nightmare in which a man is about to be murdered on the Golden Gate Bridge, finds the mysterious stranger standing at the foot of her bed. Very quickly they become enmeshed in a nasty bit of international espionage involving fifth columnists, double agents, and an extremely well-placed MacGuffin. 65 min.

Friday, August 1

4:30
Man in the Dark. 1953. USA. Directed by Lew Landers. Screenplay by George Bricker. With Edmond O’Brien, Audrey Totter, Ted de Corsia, Nick Dennis. The prolific and occasionally personal B filmmaker Lew Landers shot this “three-dimensional chiller” in a breakneck 11 days, enabling Columbia Pictures to rush the film into theatrical release a mere 48 hours before Warner Bros.’ House of Wax and launch a brief 3-D arms race among the Hollywood studios. An experimental brain surgery designed to cure O’Brien of his criminal impulses instead gives him an unfortunate case of amnesia, as his former gangster colleagues kidnap and beat him senseless to discover where he’s stashed the payroll loot. Only the comforts of Audrey Totter, agolden-hearted, golden-haired fatale, can soothe his weary soul. Screening in 3-D DCP from Sony Pictures. 70 min.

6:45
Gilda. 1946. USA. Directed by Charles Vidor. Screenplay by Marion Parsonnet. With Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready, Joseph Calleia. Audiences continue to swoon to Hayworth’s performance as the erotic, unattainable Gilda, trapped in a hateful ménage a trois with brooding sadist Glenn Ford and chilly German casino owner George Macready in Buenos Aires. Costume designer Jean Louis is said to have used John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X as the inspiration for the black gown in which Hayworth famously performs her sly striptease, “Put the Blame on Mame.” 110 min. Digital projection.

Saturday, August 2

2:30
Man in the Dark. 1953. USA. Directed by Lew Landers. Screenplay by George Bricker. With Edmond O’Brien, Audrey Totter, Ted de Corsia, Nick Dennis. The prolific and occasionally personal B filmmaker Lew Landers shot this “three-dimensional chiller” in a breakneck 11 days, enabling Columbia Pictures to rush the film into theatrical release a mere 48 hours before Warner Bros.’ House of Wax and launch a brief 3-D arms race among the Hollywood studios. An experimental brain surgery designed to cure O’Brien of his criminal impulses instead gives him an unfortunate case of amnesia, as his former gangster colleagues kidnap and beat him senseless to discover where he’s stashed the payroll loot. Only the comforts of Audrey Totter, a golden-hearted, golden-haired fatale, can soothe his weary soul. Screening in 3-D DCP from Sony Pictures. 70 min.

5:00
Gilda. 1946. USA. Directed by Charles Vidor. Screenplay by Marion Parsonnet. With Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready, Joseph Calleia. Audiences continue to swoon to Hayworth’s performance as the erotic, unattainable Gilda, trapped in a hateful ménage a trois with brooding sadist Glenn Ford and chilly German casino owner George Macready in Buenos Aires. Costume designer Jean Louis is said to have used John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X as the inspiration for the black gown in which Hayworth famously performs her sly striptease, “Put the Blame on Mame.” 110 min. Digital projection.

7:45
The Lady from Shanghai. 1947. USA. Directed by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Welles, based on the novel If I Die Before Waking, by Sherwood King. With Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane, Ted de Corsia. Like so many Orson Welles films, The Lady from Shanghai is a shadow of its former self, as Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn trimmed Welles’s 155-minute cut by nearly an hour and refused to follow his scoring notes. Nonetheless, this is noir at its best, with Rita Hayworth as the seductive Scheherazade who entangles naïve Irish sailor Welles in romantic intrigue, an insurance scam, and murder. Baroque set pieces on a yacht (on loan from Errol Flynn for the production), a Chinese opera theater, and, most famously, a funhouse hall of mirrors, give Welles free rein with deep-focus, chiaroscuro photography, optical distortions, and shock editing. 87 min. New 4K digital restoration by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Sunday, August 3

2:30
The Lady from Shanghai. 1947. USA. Directed by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Welles, based on the novel If I Die Before Waking, by Sherwood King. With Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane, Ted de Corsia. Like so many Orson Welles films, TheLady from Shanghai is a shadow of its former self, as Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn trimmed Welles’s 155-minute cut by nearly an hour and refused to follow his scoring notes. Nonetheless, this is noir at its best, with Rita Hayworth as the seductive Scheherazade who entangles naïve Irish sailor Welles in romantic intrigue, an insurance scam, and murder. Baroque set pieces on a yacht (on loan from Errol Flynn for the production), a Chinese opera theater, and, most famously, a funhouse hall of mirrors, give Welles free rein with deep-focus, chiaroscuro photography, optical distortions, and shock editing. 87 min. New 4K digital restoration by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

4:45
Dead Reckoning. 1947. USA. Directed by John Cromwell. Screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett, Steve Fisher. With Humphrey Bogart, Lizabeth Scott, Morris Carnovsky, Wallace Ford. A returning war hero (Bogart) investigates the sudden disappearance of a paratrooper buddy who’s been accused in a crime of passion, only to get drawn into a Florida Gulf love triangle involving Coral Chandler (Scott), a husky-voiced cabaret singer who harbors deadly secrets, and a smarmy casino owner named Martinelli (Carnovsky). Lizabeth Scott may have been no Lauren Bacall, but John Cromwell and Humphrey Bogart seem to be having fun quoting earlier noirs like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. 100 min.

Monday, August 4

4:30
The Burglar. 1957. USA. Directed by Paul Wendkos. Screenplay by David Goodis. With Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield, Martha Vickers, Mickey Shaughnessy. Pulp existentialist David Goodis brings his own crime novel to the screen in classic hardboiled fashion. A botched jewel heist sparks sexual tension, incestuous childhood guilt, and treachery among thieves and crooked cops—and who can blame them, with voluptuous Jayne Mansfield at the center of it all? The Burglar represents a transitional, self-reflexive noir made at the twilight of the studio system in the late 1950s. 90 min.

6:45
Murder by Contract. 1958. USA. Directed by Irving Lerner. Screenplay by Ben Simcoe. With Vince Edwards, Philip Pine, Herschel Bernardi. Vince Edwards plays a Melvillian contract killer who executes his assignments with ruthless, Zen-like efficiency, using any potential weapon at hand, while still finding time to take in the tourist sites around town. Unsurprisingly, his fatal flaw is his wary distaste of women, particularly the one he’s hired to kill. Irving Lerner’s perversion of the postwar American Dream—Claude wants to settle down in a humble riverside cottage, and sees his line of business as the swiftest means to that end—resembles the tarnished aspirations of so many Nicholas Ray and Martin Scorsese antiheroes. 81 min.

Image: Drive a Crooked Road. 1954. USA. Directed by Richard Quine.

Press Contact:
Meg Montgoris, (212) 708-9757, meg_montgoris@moma.org

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