The 2025 edition of the Noir City film festival at Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre is on and pays tribute to the genre's formidable femme fatales, many of whom were interviewed onstage by festival programmer/curator/film preservationist and Czar Of Noir Eddie Muller. TCM's Alicia Malone (seen in the Noir City 22 poster) co-hosts this weekend's shows.
Noir City returns to Oakland's spectacular art deco movie palace, the Grand Lake Theater on 3200 Grand Avenue, with a great lineup of classic movies.
In my old stomping grounds, the San Francisco Bay Area, there are events galore, including the 2024 edition of the Noir City film festival at Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre.
If you happen to reside in Northern California (or have generous family members or friends with available guest rooms there), by all means check these events out.
Have had the pleasure of seeing many Noir City festivals, which always present an amazing and varied classic movie extravaganza. Also attended a very funny performance of The Kids In The Hall comedy troupe at SF Sketchfest a few years ago.
SF Sketchfest starts tonight and extends through February 4. A bunch of my favorite comics, including Eric Idle and Weird Al Yankovic, will be performing in the 2024 lineup of the San Francisco Comedy Festival.
Noir City 21 at Oakland's Grand Lake Theater kicks off tomorrow night and Stephanie Miller's Sexy Liberal comedy show, featuring John Fugelsang, Hal Sparks and Frangela, will rock San Francisco's Herbst Theater at 401 Van Ness Avenue this Saturday at 8:00 p.m.
"A swanky, sexy, and sinister excursion back in time."
We plug classic movie events here, and one of the best, the outstanding Noir City film festival, opens Friday.
The 20th anniversary Noir City fest will trip the footlights fantastic at Oakland's art deco movie palace, the Grand Lake Theater on 3200 Grand Avenue.
Film Noir Foundation founder and Turner Classic Movies host Eddie Muller elaborates: “The Grand Lake may be smaller in capacity than the Castro," said Muller, "but it's a jewel of a movie palace, and it intends to remain a movie house—so it's a great fit for what we do—which is to offer a contemporary equivalent of the classic movie-going experience for a new generation of fans.”
The 20th anniversary extravaganza is a 24-film salute to the gritty netherworld of film noir.
A host of famous and infamous thrillers produced in 1948 will be part of the bullet-riddled, Tareyton-burned, Jack Daniels-stained, lipstick-smudged fun.
The cinematic lineup represents such directors as Orson Welles, John Huston, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak and Frank Borzage - and shall be presented in proper big screen glory.
The official Noir City press release adds: NOIR CITY, the most popular film noir festival in the world, celebrates its 20th anniversary in the Bay Area with a ten-day extravaganza featuring 24 films from the heart of Hollywood's noir movement.
Every film on the schedule is celebrating its 75th anniversary, with several of the movies having never before been screened at NOIR CITY. Included: a personal favorite of the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, the 1948 version of UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (a.k.a. The Symphony Story), a diabolical masterpiece written and directed by the great Preston Sturges.
Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller shall host and provide the informative, entertaining intros and outros we have been seeing on TCM's Noir Alley.
The 20th Anniversary Noir City Film Festival When: January 20 to January 29, 2023
Where: Grand Lake Theater, Oakland, CA
Why: It's BIG SCREEN FUN!
Who Benefits: The Film Noir Foundation, the cause of film preservation and most of all. . . the moviegoing audience!
Sincerely hope that the intense storms the Bay Area has been undergoing over the past ten days to two weeks will abate long enough for movie fans to get out to the Grand Lake and enjoy this great festival.
More than a tad bummed out over not being able to attend the 2022 Noir City festival, opening tonight at Oakland's Grand Theatre, we'll cheer ourselves up by nostalgically revisiting the memories of Noir City festivals gone by. . .
Particularly like the tres cool trailers a.k.a. overtures created by filmmaker Serena Bramble for the Noir City Film Festivals.
The Big Knockover: Noir City 15 Overture on Vimeo.
Serena Bramble's cinematic overture for the 14th Noir City Film Festival takes the cake for the sheer number of Hollywood stars - Bogey! Crawford! Garfield! Eddie G! - represented in a brief running time.
The epic Noir City film festival, lost to coronavirus lockdown in 2021, was slated to a new venue, Oakland's Grand Lake Theatre earlier this year, on January 29. Then along came, sadly, not Betty or Jones, but That Darn Omicron. Happily for fans of hard-boiled thrillers and cinema chiaroscuro, Noir City 19 has been rescheduled and will begin next Thursday.
To quote the official press release: 2022's edition, subtitled "They Tried to Warn Us!", showcases 12 movies from mid-20th century Hollywood sure to resonate with contemporary viewers. Included are shockingly prescient films focusing on megalomaniacal politicians, corrupt businessmen, neo-Nazis, racism, anti-Semitism, sexual predators, serial killers, police brutality — even a viral epidemic!
This NOIR CITY program could not be more timely or topical.
As far as the 2020's go, that description sounds about right - and Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog would add "grifters," "grafters," "poseurs," "rat bastards", "sleazy oligarchs," "filthy rich dirtbags" and "craven cowards."
The press release adds:NOIR CITY 19: The Bay Area Film Noir Festival, will open with a double bill. First up, All the King's Men (1949), the noir-stained 1950 Best Picture Oscar winner, starring Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark, an ambitious Southern politician who doesn't let ethics interfere with his meteoric political rise. Crawford won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance.
It's paired with the world premiere of the FNF's latest 35mm restoration — The Argyle Secrets, a 1948 B-picture directed by Cy Endfield, returned to circulation this year through the partnership of the Film Noir Foundation and UCLA Film & Television Archive. The film's mystery centers around "The Argyle Album" containing the names of U.S. politicians and industrialists who abetted the Nazis in World War II.
Weeknight shows will be presented as double bills, with one $15 admission price for two movies. Saturday and Sunday shows will have separate admissions ($12.50) for each screening. All-Access Passports, granting admission to all 12 films, are available for $100, a $30 savings over the purchase price of individual tickets. FNF proceeds from the NOIR CITY festival benefit the foundation's efforts to rescue and restore noir films in danger of being permanently lost or damaged.
The full schedule, Passports (all-access passes), individual tickets, and program notes are available at NoirCity.com.
Sadly for the tough talkin' hard-boiled noirista-filled gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we will not be able to attend the 2022 festival. Sincerely hope we will be back watching classic noir in big screen glory in 2023. . . We shall miss all our friends who we enjoyed hanging out with at past Noir City events at San Francisco's Castro Theatre.
"Now, more than ever, it's essential to resist the dread and paranoia of contemporary times by looking beyond our differences. Let's appreciate the noir ethos for the creativity it inspires and the warning flares it long ago flashed on screens worldwide. Noir has no national boundaries. It's the same story, everywhere." Eddie Muller a.k.a. The Czar Of Noir
As Victoria Mature, ace opera singer (and daughter of Victor Mature) is seen doing in the Noir City International poster, we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog shall be traveling to the mecca of classic movies, San Francisco's Castro Theatre, soon. . .
Why? To see the 2020 Noir City Film Festival, of course!
Dyed-in-the-wool film buffs return to that quintessential Art Deco movie palace, the Castro Theatre, for heaping helpings of desperation, thuggery, skullduggery, chicanery, double-crossing dames, sex-starved saps, bullet-riddled sedans, doomed relationships, nervous cigarette smoking, cheap hotels, furtive claustrophobia, post-WWII style ennui and inevitably, endless roads leading nowhere.
As always, the Film Noir Foundation deserves kudos, bravos and huzzahs for putting their money where their Jack Daniels-stained, Tareyton-burned, lipstick-smudged mouths are for presenting newly struck 35mm prints of numerous classic films for the Noir City Film Festival.
This time the foreboding-filled cinematic extravaganza is literally all over the map. Represented in the program: directors Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Román Viñoly Barreto (Argentina), Julio Bracho (Mexico), Zbynek Brynych (Czechoslovakia), Julien Duvivier (France), Roberto Gavaldón (Mexico), Kim Ki-young (South Korea), Helmut Käutner (West Germany), Toshio Masuda (Japan), Jean-Pierre Melville (France), Masahiro Shinoda (Japan), Andrzej Wajda (Poland) and Jirà Weiss (Czechoslovakia).
The official Noir City press release elaborates:
"The 10-day excursion travels through hot-blooded nightclubs of the Mexican cabareteras, neon-streaked alleys of Japanese yakuza thrillers, the stylish Parisian underworld, Italian palazzos hiding crimes of every social strata, a Kafkaesque Prague as envisioned by the Czech New Wave — even a rare serial killer film set in Nazi Germany made by Hollywood's finest director of film noir, Robert Siodmak.
The Film Noir Foundation will premiere two new restorations at NOIR CITY 18, both little-known 1950s noir gems from Argentine director Román Viñoly Barreto: La bestia debe morir (1952) and El vampiro negro (1953).
Both restorations were completed in 2019 by the FNF's preservation partner, UCLA Film & Television Archive, with support provided from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Charitable Trust (The HFPA Trust)."
This year's pungent, smoldering and foreboding-filled Yule Log from the Film Noir Foundation hits the silver screen at San Francisco's Castro Theatre on Wednesday evening. The show features a Merry Noir Christmas film which would later inspire the 1964 Bette Davis vehicle Dead Ringer. Buy tickets for Noir City Xmas here.
In La Otra (a.k.a. The Other One), a brooding revenge drama set at Christmastime, the always stunning Dolores del Rio stars in a dual role as estranged twin sisters - one, a chronically depressed and poverty-stricken manicurist, the other a wife of an extremely wealthy man - who meet again and soon see their lives get turned upside down, backwards and sideways.
