Very interesting evening at Noir City last night. We had the rare opportunity to see Richard Wright (then 43) acting in the role of Bigger Thomas (age 25) in the film version of Wright's 1940 novel Native Son. Wright took the part because Canada Lee (Lifeboat), who played Bigger on Broadway, declined the role, saying he was too old (he was 44). Apparently, no studio in the United States thought the movie would make any money outside of the larger metropolitan areas and sure as hell wouldn't play in the South, so it was shot in Buenos Aires (standing in for Chicago) and directed by Pierre Chenal. And I'm sorry to say that the backstory was the best part of the film; there wasn't one decent actor in the bunch. Made me want to see the Matt Dillon/Elizabeth McGovern version all over again.

After hearing how hard it was going to be to show Native Son in the U.S., I was a little surprised to learn that the adaptation of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust was shot entirely in Oxford, Mississippi by MGM, no less. Claude Jarman, Jr. himself introduced the film, saying Louis B. Mayer did not want to shoot it, but director Clarence Brown, who had seen a lynching as a young boy, convinced Mayer to make the picture. Jarman told us that many of the townspeople who appear in the film as extras were on hand for the poor optics arounds the integration of Ole Miss two years after this film was shot and that the star, Juano Hernandez, couldn't (of course) stay at the same hotel as the rest of the cast.

The story is of a black man arrested for the murder of a noted local racist, who was found shot in the back, said black man found near him with a pistol that had recently been shot. Young Chick (Jarman) has formed an unusual friendship over the years with the accused, Lucas Beauchamp (Hernandez) and happens to be the nephew of the local lawyer, an annoying jackass who doesn't listen to ANYONE, but is presumably the voice of White Reason in this film and who agrees to defend the man. A gorgeous alliance of Chick, his black buddy Aleck, and the elderly white lady Miss Eunice (played by the excellent Elizabeth Patterson) help vindicate Lucas. The town is all excited by a prospective lynching and make a carnival of it. When said lynching is not forthcoming, they all wander off, kicking the dust, going "Aw, gee." All is tentatively OK by the end, with the local black population feeling safe enough to go back into town and Chick and Uncle Smugly comment on the condition of mankind.

It's a real good picture, actually, and very much worth seeing. 

My favorite kind of flight is generally the kind where no one speaks to me. At all. So I was delighted when I slipped past the nicely-dressed man in the aisle seat who clearly wanted to sleep and set up my social barrier by the window. It wasn't until we began to touch down in San Francisco that he made light chit-chat and I mentioned I was here for Noir City 11, the annual film noir festival. 

Turns out this fellow had caught an old movie on TCM just the other day and saw something so amazing that he grabbed his phone and took a video (of his television), because it was so cool. Then he showed me (on his phone) a portion of the fabulous duet at the "West Indies Club" scene from Another Thin Man (1939), below:

I took it as a good omen for this year's program. My first night (the fourth of the festival) was very early nearly-noir; borderline horror and psycho-drama, billed as a:

First up was A House Divided (1931), a crazy melodrama directed by William Wyler, set in a fishing town straight out of Popeye — the scary Max Fleischer Popeye — where everyone is singing shantys, mending nets, and every other person has a wooden leg. Walter Huston plays a sociopathic brute who, on the day of his wife's funeral, tries to get his namby-pamby son (Douglass Montgomery, a.k.a. Kent Douglass) drunk and laid at the local bar...to cheer him up. And that's just the first three minutes.

Enter pretty teenage Helen Chandler (I forget how or why), who Huston declares he's going to marry even though he's a pig and she's half his age. Namby-Pamby goes along at first, thinking at least if his father has someone, the kid can finally leave that stinkin' town and have a life, but realizes how very yick that would be (for her) and intercedes by getting in a fist fight with his father on the wedding night. During the course of this very brutal fight, Huston goes crashing through the upstairs bannister and winds up paralyzed and even more hateful (while Chandler remains in tact, as it were). There are some very creepy scenes of Huston dragging himself around, useless legs trailing behind, menacing the two young people who have, of course, by now fallen in love.

Anyway, there's a big storm with thunder and raging seas and the girl out on a boat having to be rescued and crippled Walter Huston dragging himself into a dinghy and disappearing. The end.

I don't have much to say about the second feature, The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933), except that it started out well, then drifted into quasi-psycho drama with much shouting and crazed eyeballs and all from the usually affable Frank Morgan. 

It's the story of a lawyer who is called to defend a man (Paul Lukas) who has just shot his wife (Gloria Stuart) in a jealous rage after finding her naked in the apartment of a Greer-Garson-less Walter Pidgeon. While crafting the defense, Morgan comes to learn that his own wife (Nancy Carroll) is cheating on him! Will he kill her? Will he not? Will he get the other guy acquitted by reason of insanity?  Meh. 

The film was directed by James Whale, who must have been directing it on the weekends and evenings around the time he was working on The Invisible Man, a much better picture.

For all the scenery chewing from those around her, it was very good to see Jean Dixon in the role of Hilda, Lady Lawyer. Dixon is one of my favorite wise-cracking sophisticates. Watch her playing off Edward Everett Horton in Holiday and you'll agree.

I couldn't stay awake for the third of the triple features, sadly. I'd been up for 21 hours at that point and not even something called Laughter in Hell could give me strength.

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 Peggy, the ingenue you want to smack, 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 real conditions like depression, trauma, or plain old mental illness.  Terry's anger and contempt are spectacular, while her 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.