Monday Night Noir at the Parkway
Twin Citians, Take-Up Productions presents Monday Night Film Noir at the Parkway theater, at (NB, this has been corrected to) 7:30pm. Tonight is Double Indemnity. The Parkway is a great, old theater and serves delicious popcorn with real butter.
Noir film is a growing interest for me, in response to Ed Brubaker’s excellent ongoing comic book, Criminal. Furthering my interest was a piece from last year, “Rerunning Film Noir” by Richard Schickel at The Wilson Quarterly (link from Arts and Letters Daily), which had some interesting insight into the aims of noir.
Traditional scholarship on this mostly American style of film said that the dark mood was a response to the discomfort of peacetime after WWII. Schickel proposes alternate interpretations that I think have a great deal of merit.
Noir films, with their greatly intensified visual style and their stress on perverse psychology, weren’t reflecting our misery in a peacetime economy….Instead, their aims were quite different (don’t forget, they were meant to entertain). For one, they were trying to give the traditional crime film a new lease on Âlife–Âparticularly in the way it represented the city’s place in the postwar world. Somewhat more originally, they were placing a new stress on the power of the Âpast–Âsomething most of us thought we had Âburied–Âto reach out and twist our fates when we least expected that to Âhappen.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Oooh, I’m jealous. Double Indemnity is a favorite of mine. If you tell me they are going to run Key Largo, I’ll cry.
January 17th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
No Key Largo, not for now anyway. But I’m a big fan of Edward G Robinson. If I can turn up a print, I’d like to run “The Stranger” sometime soon.