Wait while I look up who did the singing* for Gloria Grahame on the excellent and terrifying number, "Ace in the Hole," in Naked Alibi, because it was so not her. She certainly did her own her "dancing."

It was a packed house at the Castro Theatre last night for the "Bad Girls" Noir City X double feature, Naked Alibi  (1954) and Pickup (1951) and worth every yawn and creaking joint this morning. What a wacky picture Naked Alibi is. Everyone was slapping somebody or shootin' 'em or stabbin' 'em or kissin' 'em...hard.  Sterling Hayden plays a seemingly-psycho cop who is convinced that the seemingly-innocent Gene Barry, local baker and family man, has murdered a few cops (one of whom was the ubiquitous Max Showalter) and becomes obsessed with proving it even after he is dismissed from the police force for brutality. Then for some reason they all go to Mexico.

Once over the border, we learn that Gene Barry has a hot cookie on the side in the form of Gloria Grahame and that Sterling Hayden has virtually no police instincts, as he is lured into a dark alley, stabbed and robbed within an hour of arriving. Billy Chapin, shoeshine boy, becomes the catalyst for Hayden meeting Grahame so they can begin their doomed romance. Eventually everyone (except Billy Chapin) goes back over the border and Gene Barry is revealed to be the murderous heel Sterling Hayden always knew he was. Gloria Grahame doesn't make it, sad to say, and I'm sorry, but Sterling Hayden is still psycho.

Gloria Grahame to Sterling Hayden: "I don't understand you, you don't understand me. We have a lot in common."
_________
* The singing was done by Jo Ann Greer, says the excellent site "Movie Dubbers" and the angel who posted the song on YouTube (it starts about a minute in). 

Beverly Michaels is my new best inappropriate girlfriend who my parents think is a bad influence and forbid me to hang arround with. I can't express how much I enjoyed her performance in Pickup, a surprisingly funny, moderately suspenseful glimpse into the life of bored bad girl in a small town.

Hugo Haas starred in, wrote, and directed this picture. Apparently, this was the first in a series of films Haas made throughout the 1950s on exactly the same topic — hot, mean girl takes shlubby middle-aged man for all he's worth (this from Eddie Muller, the Czar of Noir, who gives a short lecture before each movie. Muller, bless him, is kind of a toolbag, but he really knows a lot, so it's worth sitting through the smarm). I'll be trolling for more of Haas's pictures, so stay tuned.

Contrary to what the posters would have you think, Pickup, isn't especially hardboiled. Each character is believeable and flawed; their choices stupid and human. Yes, it's a B noir, but the story is ultimately about loneliness, companionship, and forgiveness — even "Betty" (Beverly Michaels) isn't completely rotten. I'm not going to elaborate, because you really should see it if you can.

Betty stepping out of Hunky's jalopy once she sees the railroad "shack" he lives in: "When's the floor show start?"

Just under three weeks until the 10th Annual Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco. I saw the preview last week while waiting for Singin' in the Rain to start (second on the program with On the Town) and wished they'd cut it about 40 seconds shorter. Alas, they did something unfortunate typographically with the "X" that signifies "10" and the "Y" in "City" and decided to go soft porn in the promo, which is both a misinterpretation of noir and a lame design treatment. Very 1982.

Happily, The program itself looks good. I'll miss Angie Dickinson and a bunch of great San Francisco-based films, but I will get there just in time for Gilda and The Money Trap and won't have to leave until right after The Great Gatsby (with Ruth Hussey!!) and Three Strangers.

Stay tuned for pre-program preparatory and in-program notes. Meanwhile: Happy New Year!

In honor of the heat and what's going on (or not going on) over the river in D.C., I'm having some friends over to watch a few films about political intrigue, power-mongering, and sensationalism. Updates to follow.

I've already done the Birthday of the Week, but today is Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's birthday and the guy was great. What can I say? Sure, the scandal was hideous and dreadful for all concerned — lurid and career-ruining — plus the woman died and everything.

Anyway, anyway... I used not to care much for slapstick at all and especially avoided the kind where the big joke was about being fat or drunk, so I didn't come around to Arbuckle until my early 20s — and then only just, because he hung around with my girlfriend, Mabel Normand.

Then last July I saw him in "The Cook" at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival with Buster Keaton and  became a true fan, as I hope you will too if you aren't already. Remember, all the stunts are done by the actors and the dog. The whole thing's a ballet.

Enjoy. But don't try any of this at home.

Part I

The other day I ran across the program to a private film festival my friend Monica and I held at her place on Shotwell Street in San Francisco some time in 1994. It was called "Nearly the 100th Anniversary of Going to the Movies" and we screened 15 movies in one day, with a half hour break in the middle to bestow Agnes Moorehead with the first (and only) Lifetime Achievement Award for Hollywood's Scandalously Neglected. The award was to have been forever after known as "The Aggie" and we never did it again, which in itself is scandalous.

It is time to set things right. I am hereby resurrecting the Aggie Awards, since it is Oscar Season and they've stopped parading the Hollywood Elders Miraculously Still Alive on the actual show.  Date and details to follow once I've had a chance to gin up interest.

Meanwhile, I'll start the ball rolling with two lists of contenders for Scandalously Neglected Actor and Scandalously Neglected Actress — and a chance for you to throw a name in the ring.

Now the boys...

Here is the program that started it all. Looking back, I'm pretty impressed with how many studios and eras we covered. It was a 12-hour extravaganza with two rooms going at once: one for features (the first seven pictures in the slideshow) and one for diversions. There may have been some drinking.

I've always liked and respected Ida Lupino, but watching her in Beware My Lovely propelled her to new heights in my estimation. The movie — produced by her production company — had me right at the very spooky opening sequence, when Robert Ryan discovers the body of his employer in a broom closet and flees across a rail yard. Soon he comes to the home of a war widow (Lupino) and begins doing odd jobs around the house. When his character, Howard, asks to hang his coat in a cleaner closet, it hit me: this was the same story as "To Find Help," another Agnes Moorehead tour de force from Suspense I had heard years ago on The Big Broadcast (WAMU 88.5)  while driving home from Brooklyn one dark and stormy night. It was so good that I sat in the car outside the house (after a 5 hour drive, mind you) just to find out who played the creepy young man. It was Frank Sinatra.

On screen last night, all things started to play out just as I remembered in the radio play with one or two modifications  to great effect (I kept a wary eye on the dog, for instance). It's a terrific, terrifying, and extremely well-acted film and I recommend it highly.

Coincidentally, seeing this movie only confirmed my feelings about "Sorry, Wrong Number" the radio play versus Sorry, Wrong Number the film, which I watched on YouTube yesterday just to make sure. I can see why people who haven't heard the Suspense broadcast would give the movie high marks — it's scary, gorgeously shot, and well acted; however, as an adaption it comes across (to me) overwrought with unecessary exposition and introducing sympathies that distort the dramatic effect of the original. It is a good movie — just not a good adaptation.

Beware My Lovely is both. Please see it.

I'm going to go ahead and say it...the movie's no good!

Really, don't bother.

Olivia de Havilland does a slightly mean kind of crazy. I'm not talking about how she plays interesting crazy, like the twin we're supposed to dislike, Terry, in The Dark Mirror, but the way she portrays the nice girl being driven crazy, twin Ruth. I get the sense that as Ruth, de Havilland was thinking of her real-life sister, Joan Fontaine, whom she famously disliked; a more professional version of how siblings make fun of each other "I'm Joan and I'm so pretty and everybody loves me, ladidadida..." De Havilland makes the good girl that much less attractive for being  easily driven crazy and I like her for that.

I also, less famously, dislike Joan  Fontaine. She's a wispy, feckless thing on screen whose posture is atrocious.  My sister, incidentally, does a great imitation of Joan Fontaine as the ingenue you want to smak, Peggy, in The Women. Maybe I'll record her doing it and post it some day.

DeHavilland's Terry —  much like the character she played two years later in the excellent Snake Pit, Virginia Cunningham — is a person with actual psychological problems caused or exacerbated by some very really conditions like depression, trauma, or plain old mental illness.  Her anger and contempt are spectaular, while easily-driven-crazy twin's bewilderment is just annoying.

As a rule, watching a girl being driven mad is kind of a boor. I mean, really, if you hear a music box playing somewhere in the house, chances are your twin sister left it on in a drawer someplace and you're not really hallucinating.  And if she tries to convince you some morning that you woke up screaming in the middle of the night confessing guilt for murdering someone, she's probably just messing with you. Seriously — Occam's Razor.

I've seen this movie a number of times, though never on a big screen until last night at Noir City 9, and I never remember that Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy from It's a Wonderful Life, Scarlett's father in Gone With the Wind, and Dizz from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington among 50 million other pictures) is in it as the police lieutenant and that he's great. Just great. A couple of his best lines:
     ** "He's a pretty smart guy for a college man."
     ** "Even a nut will figure out that it's easier to kill a rival than than to knock off her boyfriends for the rest of her life." (or something like that. I was very tired.)

Please do see it if you can. It's not on DVD, but you could probably find it on a dusty old VHS someplace.

Photo taken inside the Castro Theatre last night during the pre-show of stills from Noir City. Castro organist, David Hegarty, shown performing before still photo of Lew Ayres and Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror pre-show.

Let me count the ways. 

But I gotta make it quick today, so I'll just list some good lines from the  Stanwyck Two-fer from last night at Noir City 9.

In case you can't read them, here are the quotes highlighted on the movie poster:
     ** "Where have I failed you as a husband?"
     ** "You're not even a woman anymore...just another dame with the 'fever'!"
     ** "I picked her up in an alley...with a pair of loaded dice in her hand!"

Some pretty dire pronouncements, don't you think? And poor Robert Preston — so strapping a guy for such a tiny mustache.

And a couple choice bits tweeted by anniebacon (a person I've never met, but who, noir-like, I now follow):
     **  Better than gambling:  "Spitting half a mile...and a two-inch steak."
     ** "I'll take a lush any day. At least a lush passes out sometimes."

Listen, I'm still on the fence about this movie on account of Agnes Moorehead scaring the pants off me when I first heard the broadcast in my Middle School AV Room. The woman who wrote the original "Suspense" play, Lucille Fletcher, also wrote the screenplay, which you think would help, but I'm just too in love with the original.

Still, Barbara's hair is much better in this picture than in The Lady Gambles. That Jane Wyman cut is  the least flattering hairdo ever; it works on no one.

By Monica Nolan:

Eddie Muller on the Castro stage said "This is my church," and the theatre was full of true believers. Overheard comment at the end of the show: "People were clapping for actors I'd never heard of." What, you've never heard of Elisha Cook, Jr.? Vince Barnett? Surely the speaker recognized Peter Lorre, who behind some bizarre buck teeth (left over from Mr. Moto?) was so ineffably Peter Lorre that we were doing imitations of him all the way home. Who else could make an escaped lunatic serial killer so sublimely creepy and sympathetic? As Eddie said, "You're my kind of crazy," although he was referring to an audience that eschews streaming netflix to pack the house for obscure movies upwards of 60 years old.

Plot summaries:
High Wall: Amnesiac vet plus dead wife equals the loony bin. But sodium pentathol cures all ills.

Stranger on the Third Floor: Elisha Cook, Jr. guilty? Not where Peter Lorre lurks. My German expressionist dream says so.

Great onstage anecdotes about Peter Lorre's on-set consumption of raw onions, and William Wyler's visit to an obscure cinema club in the Sunset in 1971, in order to see Stranger on the Third Floor (his wife starred as an ingenue). Their daughter was there, and you could see the resemblance to her mom. I was shocked because I've been to parties with her (she's on the board of the silent film fest) and I'd never realized how close I was to Hollywood royalty.

Got some lovely photos taken by my excellent spouse, Maggie, of the splendid Castro Theatre and the crowd waiting to get in for the first double feature: High Wall and Stranger on the Third Floor.

Tweeted by an attendee: "We have something in common: you're slated for the electric chair & my arthritis is killing me" — best line from High Wall