#Death dream film movie
The coolest movie star ever plays a private eye hired by Kirk Douglas’ grinning, sinister crime lord to track down a mistress (Jane Greer) who recently shot him and absconded with $40,000. Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 “ Out of the Past” is a marvel of doomy romanticism and boasts what could be the quintessential Robert Mitchum performance. It's tough to pick a favorite of the bunch, but I suppose I should start with the one for which I have a framed poster hanging in my office. Still from "Out of the Past." (Courtesy Photofest) Like good Americans, we processed these anxieties the way we usually cope with such deep-seated stuff - by exorcising it in our pulp entertainment. It is not uncommonly noted that such films spoke to the fears of traumatized men returning from WWII to find that women had become far more independent in their absence. Beyond obvious stylistic signifiers like shadowy, expressionistic lighting (often necessitated by small budgets) these movies were distinguished by their shocking violence and morally dubious male anti-heroes rendered helpless by the powerful, overtly sexualized females who drove the narrative. Like most smart things having to do with movie criticism, the term "film noir" was originated by the French, referring to a strain of fatalistic American crime pictures that flourished in the early postwar years. It's a fantastic lineup of titles, so rich in cinema history that the Coolidge is throwing in a few pre-screening seminars with college professors to provide educational context for audiences. At the same time, The Brattle Theatre is screening 11 crime pictures from 1947, 10 of them celebrating their 75th anniversaries in the old-fashioned double feature format, delivering twice the bang for your buck. Over the next four weeks, the Coolidge Corner Theatre will be presenting six big screen classics spanning five decades from the genre’s 1940s heyday to its fleeting revival in the 1990s. For cinephiles of a certain temperament, this is the most wonderful time of the year, celebrating Hollywood’s hard-boiled fools for love and the frisky femme fatales that are their undoing. November is once again "Noirvember" at your neighborhood repertory houses, bringing back the best in cynical thrillers with bungled murder plots, bummer endings and sardonic voice-over narrations. It’s time to tilt the Venetian blinds, turn on the ceiling fans and settle into the undeniable sexiness of smoking cigarettes in chiaroscuro lighting. It is the month when we give thanks for leggy, duplicitous dames and doomed private dicks played for patsies. A still from Henry Hathaway's "Kiss of Death" (1947).
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