Tag Archives: Elliot Lavine

A Singular Career: The Roxie pays tribute to actor Don Murray

10 Thursday Jul 2014

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After toiling in television for half a dozen years, Don Murray made his big screen debut in Joshua Logan’s romantic comedy drama Bus Stop (1956). His role as a cowboy smitten with a singer played by Marilyn Monroe earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor and made him a movie star at 27. He went on to make a number of high-profile films, including A Hatful of Rain (1957) and Advise and Consent (1962), but his career never quite reached the heights that Bus Stop promised.

Instead, Murray’s career became much more idiosyncratic and much more interesting. He worked on a number of his own projects, including writing, producing, and starring in The Hoodlum Priest (1961), an involving drama shot by Haskell Wexler with Murray as a priest struggling to keep juvenile delinquents on the straight and narrow, and writing, producing, and starring in Confessions of Tom Harris (1969), a truly eccentric drama in which Murray plays the titular character, a one-time vicious criminal who became a prison chaplain as well as Murray’s stand-in and stunt double after a conversion to faith. He also appeared in independent features, such as Herbert Danska’s Sweet Love, Bitter (1967), a downbeat drama set to Mal Waldron’s evocative score, in which Murray plays an alcoholic college professor in free fall who becomes friends with a Charlie Parker-like, junkie jazz musician played by comedian Dick Gregory.

All of these films and more will screen July 11-13 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater as part of A Very Special Weekend with Don Murray. Coordinated by Roxie programmer Elliot Lavine and filmmaker Don Malcolm, who is currently directing and producing Unsung Hero, a documentary about Murray, the program offers a broad range of Murray’s movie and television work. The actor, who turns 85 this month, will be on hand over the weekend along with other special guests.

Malcolm will also screen clips from Unsung Hero throughout the retrospective. In this Q&A, he talks about Murray, his career, and what inspired Malcolm to make a documentary.

Q: Was there a defining movie for you, one that made you think, ‘There’s a film here?’

Donald Malcolm: I would say The Hoodlum Priest really broke something open. Don was the writer of the script, the producer, and all of that. I said, ‘How could that combination of talent not end up doing more of that kind of work?’ I found out why later on as we got into it. I think it really galvanized him—it didn’t happen all at once—I went and did the research and found the things that were hard to find.

I suddenly realized there were two phases to his career, the one that was sort of in the wake of Bus Stop up through The Hoodlum Priest. Then there was the material that followed, which then became more puzzling, more interesting, and just made the story even more needed to be told. As I got to know Don, I got to understand his perspective on it. Then I realized there were aspects of what he had been doing and the type of person he was when he wasn’t making movies that made it clear there was another thread that can be told in the story.

Q: In his more personal work there seems to be an emphasis on social justice and faith, most explicitly in The Hoodlum Priest.

DM: There’s a point of connection between social justice and the benefits of religious faith, and understanding how to apply it and how to use it in one’s life without being doctrinaire about it…Hoodlum Priest is what I would call a combination of a social problem film and neorealism jammed together to make a very hyper-dramatic point, which I think it’s very successful in doing, but it is looking backward into a different style of filmmaking that I think Don became enamored with when he first came to Hollywood. Obviously, he had an idea of how he wanted that film to look and he found Haskell Wexler making B noirs. He signed Wexler and [director] Irvin Kershner to do it from that side of the camera for him.

Q: Did you have any problems tracking down material for the documentary? Obviously, there are the things you’re screening at the Roxie, but beyond that group of movies, did anything prove elusive?

DM: There’s tons of stuff we weren’t able to get and we’re still working on getting bits and pieces to show in the film. One of the areas that will be covered as part of the quartet of films we’re showing on Saturday that deal with race relations is the live Philco Playhouse TV show called A Man Is Ten Feet Tall where he is opposite Sidney Poitier. Live television experience was something that buoyed Don quite a bit, because his contract with Fox didn’t push him to do that many movies and he was having trouble finding movies, because they kept trying to find some variation of Bus Stop or cowboy or whatever. They never quite figured out how to market him or go with him beyond that, because he also had a mind of his own and said, ‘I don’t want to do that kind of work.’

Don never wanted to do the same thing twice. As he said, ‘I came to Hollywood and they said I needed to establish a persona that the audience could relate and would be a reliable thing for them to get behind. I did the exact opposite.’ Live television turned out to be a great way for Don and many other actors with similar predilections to stay working…The actors enjoyed the challenge of working in a live context. It was like doing a play one time in front of a national audience. It also kept them in the public eye, because those shows were popular. That sustained Don quite a bit and that is one of the areas of his career that is difficult to reconstruct sufficiently in the documentary.

Q: How much time have you spent with Don?

DM: Quite a bit. Quite a bit of time, quite a lot of discussion to understand his perspective and finding out about his development as a young man and how he came to form a lot of his ideals and beliefs. It was important to have the time and also meet some of the people who worked with him when he was doing the refugee project that he did in the late ’50s that was an outgrowth of him doing alternative service as a conscientious objector during Korea. That’s all part of the story, trying to get people to understand the kind of person he is and how that shapes a lot of work that he’s done.

Don said, ‘Are you sure that my story is really the one that should be told? Is it really all that bad?’ I said, ‘All that bad? You’re a stoic. You’re a survivor. You’re a guy that found a way to forget about be forgotten and found a way to live a life that had nothing to do with all the hype and the craziness that can go in being in that kind of profession.’—Pam Grady

For more information about A Very Special Weekend with Don Murray, visit roxie.com.

I WAKE UP DREAMING 2014: Noir returns to the Roxie

15 Thursday May 2014

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A decade before all those tapes started self-destructing when he played American spy Jim Phelps in Mission:Impossible, Peter Graves played a different kind of secret agent in the 1957 crime thriller Death in Small Doses. One of the 30 film noirs that Elliot Lavine is screening at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater as part of I Wake Up Dreaming 2014, Phelps is Tom Kaylor, an FDA agent sent undercover as a big-rig truck driver to get the scoop on the truckers’ “co-pilots,” amphetamines, in the wake of yet another fiery crash chalked up to demon Benzedrine. Kaylor’s driving partner Wally Morse (Roy Engel) warns him not to try the stuff. His boarding house roommate and fellow rig jockey Mink Reynolds (ex-major league baseball and NFL star and future Rifleman Chuck Connors) can’t get enough of the stuff, a jittery hipster who can’t sit still. Boarding house landlady Val Owns (Mala Powers) Kaylor sees as a victim of Benny, the widow of the dead trucker that inspired the investigation. There is big money to be made in pushing pills and before too long murder enters the picture.

All of the films in I Wake Up Dreaming 2014 are part of the Warner Archive, culled from the pre-code 1932 to 1965 when the production code was on its way out, and comprised of titles from Warner Bros., RKO, Monogram, MGM, and Allied Artists. Death in Small Doses is only one of the highlights, a nasty, atmospheric little thriller with not an ounce of fat on its lean 79-minute frame. Connors is a standout as the pixelated hophead Mink, scary and charismatic, in a role a world away from Lucas McCain, the quiet, upstanding sharpshooter that would come to define the actor during his five-year run on The Rifleman.

If Death in Small Doses is indicative of anything in I Wake Up Dreaming 2014, it is of the slate’s pure entertainment value. These movies, a mix of rarities and classics, are fun to watch and even more fun to watch on the big screen in a theater full of people. Among the highlights in the 2014 roster are:

The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)—The opening night film along with 1947’s The Unsuspected, this offbeat B-thriller is thought to be America’s first noir. As a reporter (John McGuire) finds himself on the fast track to the electric chair for a murder he didn’t commit, it is the police and the American judicial system that are revealed as bigger heavies than the killer—a sentiment that won’t be lost on 21st century film goers. Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr. costar.

When Strangers Marry (1944)—Future horror maestro William Castle helms this taut romantic thriller starring Kim Hunter as a woman who impulsively marries Dean Jagger, a man she just met. When she travels to New York to meet him and he fails to turns up, but Robert Mitchum, a charming old flame, appears, she wonders if she made a mistake. Her uneasiness turns to fear when she discovers that Jagger is suspected of murder. But did he really do it? This sleek suspense yarn keeps the audience guessing and gets a boost of adrenalin from the smoldering Mitchum.

The Locket (1946)—Mitchum stars as well in this Rashomon-like noir as one of Laraine Day’s past loves. Gene Raymond is about to marry her when a former husband (and her one-time psychiatrist) Brian Aherne turns up to warn the groom away from his troubled bride, telling a tale in flashbacks of kleptomania and murder.

Split Second (1953)—One-time Philip Marlowe Dick Powell makes his directing debut with this tense slice of nuclear paranoia. Stephen McNally is the leader of a group of escaped prisoners who hide away with a group of hostages in a Nevada ghost town. One of the cons is wounded, but that’s not the worst of it: the place is an A-bomb test site that is about to be vaporized. For the hostages, it becomes a desperate race not just to escape McNally and his men, but also the coming explosion. This tight, nail-biting relic of the Atomic Age costars Jan Sterling, Alexis Smith, Arthur Hunnicutt, and Richard Egan.

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960)—Western auteur Budd Boetticher detours into noir with this thrilling and stylish biopic of the Depression era gangster. Ray Danton is Diamond, hoofer turned hood, who begins as Arnold Rothstein’s (Robert Lowery) bodyguard and rises to the top of the mob food chain—but not for long. Gorgeously lensed by legendary cinematographer Lucien Ballard, this compelling period drama also stars the great Warren Oates as Danton’s consumptive brother Eddie.

Miracles for Sale (1939)—Robert Young stars as an ex-magician, manufacturer of magicians’ tricks and a debunker of the supernatural in Freaks director Tod Browning’s final film. When he’s called upon to protect Florence Rice, a young woman in peril, Young is pulled into a murder mystery involving mediums and illusionists. Full of magic tricks and comic banter, this lighthearted proto-noir also stars William Demarest as a crotchety police detective and Frank Craven as Young’s visiting dad.

Brainstorm (1965)—Actor William Conrad steps behind the camera to direct this remarkable late noir starring Jeffrey Hunter as a scientist who plots to murder his lover Anne Francis’ husband Dana Andrews, believing that his history of mental illness will help him elude punishment. Viveca Lindfors costars as Hunter’s psychiatrist and the one person who knows for sure whether or not he is really mad.—Pam Grady

I Wake Up Dreaming 2014 runs Friday, May 16, through Sunday, May 25, at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., San Francisco. For tickets and further information, visit roxie.com.

Roxie Theater’s I WAKE UP DREAMING Fundraiser Stars Rare Noir

21 Friday Mar 2014

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The Argyle SecretsThirty films will unreel at the 2014 edition of Elliot Lavine’s I Wake Up Dreaming noir film festival, a staple since 1990 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater. During the festival’s 10-day run—Friday, May 16-Sunday, May 25—Lavine promises “a spectrum of pre-code crime, proto-noir, full-on film noir, and even a smattering of post-noir.” He will announce the full lineup and screen 1948’s The Argyle Secrets, a rarity not seen on the big screen locally in nearly seven decades, at the Roxie’s first ever I Wake Up Dreaming benefit on Wednesday, March 26.

The Roxie event promises to be a memorable evening that will also include an auction of vintage noir memorabilia; the unveiling of the 2014 I Wake Up Dreaming poster, featuring the work of artist Mark Stock, who will be on hand to sign posters; a screening of Rudolph Maté’s 1949 classic D.O.A.; and free liquor.

The evening’s highlight, Cy Endfield’s The Argyle Secrets, stars William Gargan as a reporter implicated in murder and on the hunt for an album, made distinctive by its argyle cover, that contains the names of American Nazi collaborators.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, “[The Argyle Secrets] shot on a B-minus budget in six days and running just over an hour, crams so much hallucinatory plot into one 24-hour period that the results have some of the hysteria as well as the dreamy drift of subsequent apocalyptic thrillers like Kiss Me Deadly.”

All money raised at the benefit will go toward supporting the nonprofit Roxie’s repertory programming.

Tickets for the first ever I Wake Up Dreaming benefit are $25. The event begins at 7pm with entertainment, the auction, poster signings and refreshments. The Argyle Secrets screens at 8pm, followed by D.O.A.  At 9:30.

For more information, call the Roxie at 415-431-3611 or Elliot Lavine at 510-482-1659.

Down Those Dark Streets: I Wake Up Dreaming 2013

10 Friday May 2013

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bluesLeave it to Elliot Lavine to emphasize the 99 44/100% aspect of his latest tour down cinema’s darkest, loneliest and most dangerous streets when he opens “I Wake Up Dreaming 2013: 99 44/100% Noir” – running May 10 through May 23 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater – with Blues in the Night, a 1941 musical.

Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s title tune that cautions against getting involved with a “sweet talkin’” woman pretty much sums up what happens to pianist Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf) when he meets sultry chanteuse Kay Grant (Betty Field) at a New Jersey roadhouse appropriately enough called The Jungle. Before riding the rails into Jersey, Jigger and his band – a quintet that includes the aptly named singer Character (Priscilla Lane), drummer Peppi (Billy Halop), trumpet player (and Character’s husband) Leo (Jack Carson) and clarinetist Nickie (future directing great and HUAC snitch Elia Kazan) – are footloose but poor. The Jungle signals a welcome change in fortunes, but then two things happen: Kay gets her hooks into Jigger and their boss, Del Davis (Lloyd Nolan), shows his true, ugly self.

Blues in the Night is no “Guys and Dolls.” There are some laughs and the tone at times, especially, at the start is deceptively light, but Jigger is on a treacherous path and the gambling den Del presides over is fraught with violence and danger. “Noir musical” might seem like an oxymoron, but direction by Anatole Litvak (“Sorry, Wrong Number,” “The Snake Pit”), a tight script by Robert Rossen (“Johnny O’Clock,” “All the King’s Men” and another who would later name names before HUAC), a fabulous Arlen and Mercer soundtrack (five songs total with the title tune, a recurring theme) and a crackerjack ensemble combine for a tense rhythmic journey to the murky side of life.

Much more murder and mayhem unfold, of course, over the course of the two-week festival. Among the other highlights:

I Wake Up Screaming (1941) – Sharing the bill with Blues in the Night” is this nifty little thriller starring Victor Mature as a man accused of murdering a model (Carole Landis). Her sister (Betty Grable) starts to believe his innocence, but the detective in charge of the case (creepy Laird Cregar, reason enough to see the movie) has already made up his mind to do everything in his power to send Mature to the death chamber. Edgy and atmospheric, the film costars Elisha Cook Jr., Alan Mowbray and Allyn Joslyn.

Johnny O’Clock (1947) – This genuine rarity stars Dick Powell (Murder My Sweet‘s Philip Marlowe) as the title character, a gambler who co-owns a casino with the shady Guido Marchettis (Thomas Gomez). When crooked cop Chuck Blayden (Jim Bannon) tries to horn in on the casino action and Blayden’s girl Harriet Hobson (Nina Foch) turns up dead not long after, dogged homicide cop Inspector Koch (Lee J. Cobb) is convinced that Johnny is the doer. If that wasn’t enough grief, Johnny also has business troubles with his partner and two women – Marchettis’ heedless wife Nelle (Ellen Drew) and the dead girl’s sister Nancy (Evelyn Keyes) – competing for his attention. Robert Rossen wrote the screenplay and made his directing debut with this thriller that traps Johnny in a nasty little web of intrigue.

The Monster and the Girl (1941) – Weird and wonderful, this hybrid blend of crime drama and horror, stars Ellen Drew as a country girl whose move to the big city comes to disaster when she is forced into prostitution. It only gets worse when her brother (Phillip Terry) is framed for murder by her gangster pimps and executed. So far, so noir – but then a gorilla nursing a grudge declares war on the mob.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) – Edward G. Robinson stars as a carny fortuneteller who gradually realizes that he has an actual gift for foreseeing the future – and that is not necessarily a good thing. After retreating from society for decades, his visions lead him back to Los Angeles first to a Bunker Hill flophouse and then to a mansion where he tries to convince a police detective (William Demarest) that his prophecies are real and that his late best friend’s heiress daughter (Gail Russell) is in mortal danger.

Black Angel (1946) – Dan Duryea is terrific as an alcoholic musician who has no memory of the night his stone-hearted wife was murdered, apparently by a man (John Phillips) she was blackmailing. Duryea offers to help the wife (June Vincent) of the condemned man clear his name, only to be plunged into a nightmare that his blackout has kept hidden.

All Through the Night (1941) – Humphrey Bogart is Gloves Donahue, a New York gambler on the hunt for cheesecake who stumbles on a Nazi conspiracy instead in this breezy, action-packed comic noir. Deprived of dessert, the Damon Runyon-esque man about Manhattan instead rallies his buddies to take on the spies. Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre are two of the Nazis, while Bogie’s pals include William Demarest, Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) – Alexander Mackendrick’s evocative portrait of black-hearted Walter Winchell-like New York columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and his “cookie full of arsenic” publicist toady Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is one of cinema’s great achievements, the perfect blend of cast, director, screenplay (by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman), cinematography (James Wong Howe), score (Elmer Bernstein) and the drama’s uncredited star – Manhattan in the 1950s.

Autumn Leaves (1956) – A year after the one-two punch in the gut of “Kiss Me Deadly” and “The Big Knife,” director Robert Aldrich returned with this romantic melodrama full of noirish foreboding as Joan Crawford plays a middle-aged spinster typist swept off her feet by the charming, younger Cliff Robertson. It isn’t tell after the couple has said their “I dos” that she begins to suspect that there is something off about her new husband, a revelation that could endanger more than just her new marriage. Nat King Cole sings the title song, providing an elegant counterpoint to some nasty bits of business.

My Gun Is Quick (1957) – Little-known Robert Bray steps into Mike Hammer’s gumshoes in this obscure Mickey Spillane adaptation. After a woman he briefly encounters in a diner turns up dead, Hammer is on the hunt for her killer in this low-budget, but thrilling and moody noir that gets a lot of mileage out of its Los Angeles’ locations.

Criss Cross (1949) – Lavine brings the 2013 edition of “I Wake Up Screaming” to a close with one of noirdom’s all-time greats. “The Killers” (1946) team of director Robert Siodmak and star Burt Lancaster reunite for this taut, complex drama that casts Lancaster as an armored car driver who will go to any length to win back his former wife (Yvonne DeCarlo) – even going so far as to plot an armored car heist with her new husband (Dan Duryea). What could possibly go wrong?

*For more information about “I Wake Up Dreaming 2013: 99 44/100% Noir” or to buy tickets, visit roxie.com.

Bang, Bang: Not Necessarily Noir 3 blasts its way into the Roxie

19 Friday Oct 2012

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This band of thieves doesn’t know each other’s real names or much of anything about one another’s past crimes. They have been brought together by a criminal mastermind whose meticulously planned “perfect” heist goes awry. Sound familiar? It is the plot of Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s indelible 1992 debut, but it also describes Ferde Grofe’s little-known crime drama, 1971’s The Day of the Wolves. One of the many influences that went into the recipe that Tarantino transformed into something uniquely his own, it is also, along with Reservoir Dogs, one of the opening night features of “Not Necessarily Noir 3.” Elliot Lavine’s latest series highlighting crime and horror in the contemporary era – 26 movies over 13 nights – opens Friday, October 19 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater and runs through Halloween.

The series gets off to a memorable start with the heist movie pairing. Grofe is not the artist Tarantino is. Heck, he is barely a craftsman, and yet The Day of the Wolves is compulsively watchable, a modest B-movie that moves briskly and offers a novel twist on the genre – these thieves have their sights set not on a mere bank or business, but on an entire town. No. 1 (Jan Murray) recruits six strangers for the job, sending them plane tickets and ordering them to grow beards, identifying them each by numbers instead of names, making them wear gloves to conceal their fingerprints and even blindfolding them to keep the location of their hideout a secret. His plan is such that even if one or more of them is caught, no one will have enough information to rat out any of the others. On the surface, the plot to rob the isolated, desert community that No. 1 has identified seems foolproof.

Lawrence Tierney’s Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs similarly tries to insure himself against capture by also recruiting strangers and using colors in place of real names. There are more variables to the bank job he plans, though, and some of the biggest are in the gang itself. In putting less than the ideal crew together, Cabot is already halfway to hell before the movie even begins.

The contrasts between The Day of the Wolves and Reservoir Dogs is fascinating and not just because while Tarantino populated his thieves with a fledgling auteur’s dream of a cast including noir great Tierney, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi and Michael Madsen, Frode had to make do with the likes of Murray (a stand-up comedian who made 248 appearance on Hollywood Squares, according to the IMDB), San Francisco native Richard Egan on the downside of his career and journeyman actor Rick Jason. The approaches the two filmmakers (both of whom penned their scripts) to violence is another telling difference, Tarantino’s ebullient embrace of gore is a million miles away from Grofe’s reticence to shed blood at all. Reservoir Dog‘s sharp dialogue, heightened suspense, arresting imagery and unforgettable performances put it in another league from The Day of the Wolves, but both movies are tense and entertaining in their very different ways and it is kick to see just where Tarantino took some of his inspiration.

All of the pairings in “Not Necessarily Noir 3” – a bargain at $11 per double feature – are as beguiling as opening night. Lavine has crafted an irresistible group of double features: dangerous, dark, devastating and wildly thrilling – oh, and nearly all are being projected in 35mm, just the way the movie gods intended. — Pam Grady

For tickets or further information about Not Necessarily Noir 3, visit www.roxie.com.

 

 

I Wake Up Dreaming 2012 Review: Une Si Jolie Petite Plage

10 Thursday May 2012

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The rain never stops falling in Yves Allegret’s Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (Such a Pretty Little Beach), one of the highlights of “I Wake Up Dreaming 2012: The French Have a Name For It!.” Elliot Lavine’s latest film noir series that runs Friday, May 11 through Thursday, May 24 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater. A resort town in the off-season provides the backdrop for a cursed man’s inexorable reckoning with fate, but even if Pierre (Gerard Philipe) arrived at the height of summer, no postcard vista or warming sunlight could cut through the gloom that is Pierre’s constant companion or alter his destiny.

Allegret’s melodrama is a triumph of mood. Like Burt Lancaster’s Swede at the start of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, Pierre is done for and he knows it. He’s on the run, more out of reflex it seems than anything else. Why he has chosen to flee to this sad corner of Normandy is murky at first, but his reaction to Georges (Andre Valmy), a teenager working around the hotel where Pierre is hiding out provides a clue. Just what he’s done is also a little vague until the landlady starts gossiping about a sensational story in the newspaper and begins playing a certain record that only further distresses Pierre. The tale of a youth corrupted and destroyed comes out in bits and pieces, and becomes more clear once Fred (Jean Servais), another visitor from Paris arrives.

Looking at the windswept, desolate beach, it’s easy to wonder if Une Si Jolie Petite Plage was on Francois Truffaut’s mind, however subconsciously, when he was writing the end of The 400 Blows, leaving Antoine Doinel frozen on the beach, his future a question mark. Certainly, Pierre’s fortunes were sealed when he couldn’t have been very much older than Antoine. Philipe is perfectly cast as that lost boy grown into a broken man who can’t imagine any future at all.

As noirs go, they don’t come much bleaker than this. Allegret complements Pierre’s distress with the rain, the pacing, and the views of the dismal shore and village (lensed by Henri Alekan, the cinematographer who shot Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire). The effect is to create a sense of an ending foretold and yet even knowing what is surely coming does not lessen the suspense nor alter the impact of the conclusion. This pretty little beach is a passageway to the heart of darkness and it is a trip well worth taking. — Pam Grady

Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (Such a Pretty Little Beach), screens on Sunday, May 13 as part of “I Wake Up Dreaming 2012: The French Have a Name For It!” at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th Street, San Francisco. For tickets or further information, visit roxie.com.

Pre-Code at the Roxie: Call Her Savage

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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Image1931 was a bad year for Jazz Age “It” girl Clara Bow. Her friend and assistant Daisy DeVoe embezzled from her and tried to blackmail her, lurid details of Bow’s private life leaking out during the sensational trial that followed. Paramount Pictures, the studio that made her a star, declined to renew her contract. If that wasn’t enough, a scandal sheet, the Pacific Coast Reporter, ran a dubious expose that purported to lift the lid off a va-va-voom sex life that the tabloid claimed was rife with multiple affairs, orgies, incest, even a tryst with her pet Great Dane. 1932’s Call Her Savage, screening Wednesday, March 7 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater as part of Elliot Lavine’s latest program, “Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films for a Nasty-Ass World,” plays like a sardonic commentary on the flame-haired actress’ very bad year. Her career was nearly over. She was about to fade into obscurity and a lifetime plagued by mental health issues, but for her penultimate moment in the spotlight, Bow remained unbowed.

In some ways, Call Her Savage comes across like a direct taunt at Bow’s detractors. Her character, Nasa Springer, even romps suggestively with a large dog, and Gilbert Roland, a former lover of Bow’s, shows up as one of the men in Nasa’s life. The Brooklyn-born Bow plays Nasa as a Texas wild child, a spoiled, impetuous heiress whose frustrated father ships her off to school in Chicago where her carousing and brawling earn her gossip column inches and the nickname “Dynamite.” She even manages to get into a fist fight at her debutante party.

Nasa’s lack of decorum is the least of it. What’s worse is her terrible judgment when it comes to men. With the exception of Moonglow (Roland), the boy she leaves back home, her taste runs to creeps with money. One, Lawrence Crosby (Monroe Owsley) marries her just to make another woman jealous. Another, Jay Randall (Anthony Jowitt), says he’s in love with her – until he realizes that she’ll never fit into his high society world. Most of the men in her life treat her badly, including her railroad baron father Pete Spring (Willard Robertson), who disowns her. Nasa teeters often on the brink of disgrace and disaster, but she is a survivor.

There are lots of goodies in the Roxie’s Pre-Code program, among them the original Scarface, the eerie Island of Lost Souls, the breezy musical Murder at the Vanities, and the melodramatic Ladies of the Big House, but Call Her Savage is in a class by itself. It hits many of the Pre-Code highlights, those elements that the Production Code would soon banish from Hollywood movies for decades to come. There is adultery, unmarried cohabitation, miscegenation, prostitution, and rape. But what makes the film stand out is Bow, blurring the line between fact and fiction, a scandalized girl playing a scandalized girl, a woman unafraid of making the most of a bad reputation. – Pam Grady

Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films for a Nasty-Ass World, March 2-8, Roxie Theater, 3117 16th Street, San Francisco. For tickets and further information, visit roxie.com.

Twisted BRAINSTORM highlights Not Necessarily Noir II

04 Friday Nov 2011

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If there is a lesson to be learned from William Conrad’s Brainstorm, screening on Saturday, November 5 at the San Francisco’s Roxie Theater as part of the Elliot Lavine-programmed Not Necessarily Noir II, it’s this: If you spy an unconscious beautiful woman locked in her car, and that car is parked on railroad tracks with a train approaching, don’t think about saving her life. Save your own and run far, far away. Rocket scientist Jim Grayam (Jeffrey Hunter) saves the pretty lady and pays a high price for his good deed in this twisted crime drama from 1965.

The woman Jim rescues is Lorrie Benson (Anne Francis) and she is the unhappy wife of Jim’s wealthy, jealous, and uber-vindicative boss Cort Benson (Dana Andrews). Greystone Mansion, the Beverly Hills estate that became a real-life crime scene in 1928 when oil heir Ned Doheny and his friend and assistant Hugh Plunkett died in a murder-suicide serves Brainstorm as the Benson’s home. The location with its dark history is appropriate as Jim – against his better judgment – falls for Lorrie. Her husband reacts with a frame job meant to portray the high-strung scientist as a a man losing his mind, which only inspires Jim to hatch an even more diabolical plot of his own. As Jim explains it to Lorrie and to comely psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Larstadt (Viveca Lindfors) he’s being crazy like a fox. But is he or is he a simply a deeply disturbed lunatic with a genius mind and homicidal tendencies?

As an actor, Conrad made his film debut in noir, portraying a gunsel in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) and he is probably most famous for his roles on TV’s Cannon and Jake and the Fatman. His directing career consisted mainly of episodic television and a handful of features. Brainstorm is the last of these and he retired from the field on a gloriously maniacal note. He sets a mood from that first scene of Lorrie in a deep sleep in the passenger seat of her car, catching a few winks while waiting for oblivion. Her world is off-kilter and so, soon enough, is Jim’s. That feeling only grows along with Jim’s paranoia as mad love pushes him beyond all reason. Hunter, who played Jesus in King of Kings, is better here playing an altogether different kind of martyr, sacrificing himself at the altar of his own madness.

There are other treats in store during the five-day Not Necessarily Noir II festival, including a double bill of Donald Siegel’s terrific 1964 remake of The Killers and Clint Eastwood’s tense, twisted 1971 directorial debut Play Misty for Me; a Joan Crawford double feature of Nicholas Ray’s flamboyant Western Johnny Guitar and the little-scene (and unavailable on DVD) 1955 melodrama Woman on the Beach; and an Edward D. Wood, Jr. triple bill hosted by Johnny Legend that will also include “Johnny Legend Presents WOODworld,” a special, 45-minute tribute to the grand master of irresistible schlock. – Pam Grady

Not Necessarily Noir II run Friday, November 4 through Tuesday, November 8 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater. For further info, visit http://www.roxie.com.

TV Noir returns to the Roxie

30 Friday Sep 2011

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TV Noir is back at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater with a week-long slate of doomed men, marked women, and dark drama. Programmed by Elliot Lavine and curated by Johnny Legend, who will also be on hand every night to introduce the shows, the series runs Sept. 30-Oct. 6. The program gets off to a running start with fan favorite Dan Duryea starring as a man whose life was derailed by a little girl’s vicious fib in “The Lie,” a 1955 episode of The Star and the Story. Beverly Garland is the child all grownup and eager to make amends, but that might not be the wisest course to take with any character essayed by the shifty Duryea. That’s only the beginning. Among the week’s highlights:

“The Haunted Clown,” an episode of the series One Step Beyond: Imagine Of Mice and Men‘s Lenny as the sorriest-looking clown you’ve ever seen. Now imagine that the girl he fancies with evocative jazz score and what you’re left with is this tragic and bizarre 1960 melodrama.

The Plot Thickens: Who killed the seer during the séance? That’s the question in this bizarre little whodunit where a quiz show panel that includes Groucho Marx query the suspects and try to guess the killer. Horror maestro William Castle created this 1963 one-off that blends murder with the celebrity panel game show format of What’s My Line? or To Tell the Truth.

“The System,” an epidsode of the series Danger: In one of his earliest filmed performances, a pugnacious Eli Wallach is a “grease monkey” who refuses to listen to the smitten cigarette girl (Kim Stanley) who warns him that he’s more likely to take a beating or worse than beat the house when he tries to win big at the casino. A 27-year-old Sidney Lumet directs.

“Four O’Clock,” an episode of the series Suspicion: E.G. Marshall is a jealous husband whose plans for getting even with the wife he’s certain is having an affair take an unexpected turn in this compact thriller based on a Cornell Woolrich story. Alfred Hitchcock’s first foray into directing for television also features a young Harry Dean Stanton in a small, but memorable role.

“A Town Has Turned to Dust,” an episode of Playhouse 90: In a town suffering a terrible drought, Mexican immigrants become a scapegoat leading to grotesque tragedy. John Frankenheimer directs a Rod Serling script that still has pointed things to say about xenophobia in the U.S. 53 years after its original 1958 airing. Rod Steiger and William Shatner star.

Legends of Horror Go Noir!: The October 3rd program is devoted to horror’s classic stars. It is a sublime experience to watch Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and Peter Lorre each take their turn in the spotlight.

“The Night America Trembled,” an episode of Studio One: Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast is both dramatized and put into context (by Edward R. Murrow, no less) in this tantalizing production for the classic drama series. James Coburn (his on-screen debut), Vincent Gardenia, Warren Beatty, Edward Asner, and Warren Oates are among the cast.

“Secret Agent,” an episode of World of Giants: The premiere episode of this short-lived series introduces Marshall Thompson as Mel Hunter, an American spy reduced to only six inches high after an unfortunate brush with radiation. Or maybe not so unfortunate, since even though he’s so tiny that he could be killed by a falling pencil, his neat petite size makes him perfect for certain covert operations. Just watch out for that cat!

“The Big Producer,” an episode of Dragnet: Someone’s pushing pornography to L.A.’s teenagers and Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb) and his partner Frank Smith (Ben Alexander) are on the case in this offbeat 1954 episode of the classic series. Martin Milner and Carolyn Jones play teens caught in scandal, but it is Ralph Moody as a movie producer reduced to publishing dirty books that is the draw. As he explains himself to Friday, he recalls a significant incident from his glory days during the silent era. While the camera records the grim reality of an abandoned Western set, the soundtrack is a symphony of the producer’s vivid memories. It is a bravura moment and a most unusual one in a series that normally rendered the world in the same black-and-white, matter-of-fact tone as Webb’s narration. – Pam Grady

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TV Noir plays Sept. 30-Oct. 6 at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th Street, San Francisco. For further information, visit http://www.roxie.com.