by Meredith Brody.

(January 14,2025)

It’s that time of year—Noir City takes over Oaktown. Better than any holiday for fans of femme fatales, thrillers, suspense, dark twists, and classic cinema.

Eddie Muller’s annual Noir City Xmas is highly anticipated not only for its always wittily-programmed Christmas-themed noir movie centerpiece — this iteration, it was the rare 1941 French film Who Killed Santa Claus?, aka L’Assassinat du père Noël — but also because the lineup for Muller’s annual Noir City film festival in January, in 2025 the 22^nd annual , was released that evening.

Which added to the anticipation of the lineup outside Oakland’s venerable Grand Lake Theater on December 18th, where the crowd started gathering at least an hour before the doors opened.

I refrained from telling my friends among them that the surprise for me had been undercut earlier when a dear friend emailed me the 2025 schedule, mysteriously released online sometime during the day. But I only glanced at it, somewhat crestfallen that I had already seen so many of the titles. There’s the comfort of the familiar, but I’m looking for the shock of the new. These days, the short-term memory has been sufficiently eroded by the daily insults to the system that I can forget almost anything, whether I want to or not.  So I enjoy the beautiful, highly-colored slide show that announces the Noir City 22 lineup, devoted to the Femme Fatale, as if I hadn’t read it earlier in the day.

The 24 movies announced feature six actresses profiled in Eddie Muller’s seminal 2002 book Dark City Dames: Jane Greer, Marie Windsor, Audrey Totter, Evelyn Keyes, Coleen Gray, and Ann Savage.

Happily, Muller has written a new and expanded version of Dark City Dames . Unhappily for us January attendees, it is scheduled to come out in April 2025. The new version includes essays on nine other actresses featured in Noir City 22: Joan Bennett, Peggie Castle, Rhonda Fleming, Marsha Hunt, Ella Raines, Ruth Roman, Jan Sterling, Claire Trevor, and Helen Walker.

I realized while watching the slide show that, thanks to Eddie and his Noir City festivals in LA, which started a couple of years before the SF version did, I actually got to listen to him interview some of them onstage and then meet a few in the flesh: Audrey Totter, very proud of her MGM lineage; Evelyn Keyes, smart but with a mean streak; Ann Savage, so different from her onscreen persona in Detour that I wish she’d gotten more roles worthy of her skill.  I’d already met the amazing Marsha Hunt way back in 1993 when she wrote her wonderful book The Way We Wore, and lovely Jane Greer because I went to school with her son, the screenwriter Larry Lasker, but meeting them again under Eddie’s auspices was a treat. (I wish there had been room in Noir City 22 for another favorite, the feisty, challenging, reclusive Lizabeth Scott, who Eddie somehow enticed into visiting the American Cinematheque several times from her house a few blocks away in Hollywood. Read Todd Hughes’ Lunch with Lizabeth to see just how difficult Ms. Scott could be.)

The same friend who had emailed me the lineup, and I, had deduced another surprise announcement before Noir City Xmas: that Eddie’s TCM colleague, Alicia Malone, would be Ms. Noir City. Why? Because she mysteriously showed up at Oakland’s Bar 355 in a couple of Eddie’s Noir Alley intros, and we correctly surmised she had come out to the West Coast for a photo shoot for Noir City 22’s poster.

The poster has two Alicias: demure bespectacled pink-lipped good girl and hot red-lipsticked-and-clawed  bad girl. Malone, who will be co-hosting with Muller for the opening weekend, also has a book coming out in April, TCM Imports: Timeless Favorites and Hidden Gems of World Cinema. And there’s an intriguing item from Ms. Malone scheduled for September, Film Fashion Icons: A Deck and Guidebook of Style Inspiration from Classic Hollywood (Turner Classic Movies). But I’m assuming there will be a book signing for her first three books, Backwards and in Heels (2017), The Female Gaze (2018), and Girls on Film (2022).  The Grand Lake’s grand mezzanine, seen in many Noir Alley intros and outros filmed during the pandemic, will have lots of tempting film books for sale, as well as stacks of Noir City annuals. There will be a book and poster signing with Alicia on the first Saturday, Jan. 25, 6:30 – 7:15 p.m.

The neighborhood’s popular Walden Pond will have a wide selection of related books for sale and on select nights two collectors will be selling noir posters.

And then there’s the reason we’re lining up outside the Grand Lake: the movies. I’m a completist. I encourage going to everything, if you can. Even though I’ve seen 19 of the 24 films, I always think “What if I can never see them again on the big screen?” And the enthusiastic, enthralled Noir City audience improves every screening.

A superbly written and beautifully illustrated program book is given out gratis to all attendees. That will surely entice you to see movies you haven’t seen and revisit those you have.

Me being me, I’m especially looking forward to the five fairly obscure movies I don’t think I’ve ever seen (there’s always the possibility that I might have caught them on TV, but that those viewings are lost in the mists of time. Happened to me just the other day with None Shall Escape, part of the Resistance Film Festival at the Roxie. But it was infinitely more powerful on the big screen, and much more poignant seeing it contextualized in a sympathetic audience.).

I am looking forward to seeing Hell’s Half Acre (John H. Auer, 1954), on opening night, Friday, January 24^th, at 9 pm, paired with a personal favorite, The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952) at 7:30 pm, both starring the statuesque Marie Windsor (aided and abetted by noir stalwart Charles Shaw in The Narrow Margin, and Evelyn Keyes, Wendell Corey, and Elsa Lanchester in Hell’s Half Acre). Eddie Muller describes it as “Tiki Noir,’ and he ought to know; he has his own tiki bar in his backyard half-acre, where he also shot TCM’s “Noir Alley” intros and outros during the pandemic.

And also excited to see The Sleeping City (George Sherman, 1950), at 3 pm on Saturday, January 25^th, with Richard Conte as a cop going undercover as a doctor in a hospital to investigate a murder, aided by Coleen Gray. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve seen this on TV. But I know I’ll have an entirely different perception of it at Noir City on the big screen as it was meant to be enjoyed.

Another new-to-me title is The Long Wait (Victor Savile, 1954), starring Anthony Quinn as one of those memory-challenged guys who wakes up to find out that he has no memory, no fingerprints, and that on top of that he’s wanted for murder. (I hate when that happens.) It plays at 9 pm on Monday, January 27^th. Mickey Spillane invented the story. Peggie Castle is the femme fatale, a four-times-married Miss Cheesecake in real life, who died of alcoholism at the age of 45. I’ve seen her in several movies, IMDb reveals to me, including another based on Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury, but I can’t conjure up a memory of her. However, she also appears in 99 River Street (Phil Karlson, 1953), a personal favorite, playing on the same program at 7 pm, so that ought to jog my memory.

The fourth anticipated title is Mary Ryan, Detective (Abby Berlin, 1949), another movie I might possibly have caught on TV at some time in the past. It stars Marsha Hunt as the title character, it was intended to be the first of a series which never materialized, and I know nothing more than that.

It was another Noir City viewing, years ago at the Castro, of Marsha Hunt in Fred Zinneman’s Kid Glove Killer (with Hunt herself sitting directly in front of me), when I realized that movies seen on the big screen with an audience were different than seeing them on TV. I’d seen Kid Glove Killer that way more than once, but that night I saw a very different film. And a better one. Another similar experience at a San Francisco Silent Film Festival screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg, with Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer, which I’d just caught on TCM, is the second reason I’ll go out of the house to see a movie on the big screen. Or even fly thousands of miles. (For lovers of silent films as well as film noir, you’ll have a difficult choice to make on February 2^nd, the closing day of Noir City 22, when the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is offering their annual Day of Silents,  4 movies with live music accompaniment, at the Sf Jazz Center.

My True Story (Mickey Rooney, 1951), playing on Wednesday, January 29^th, at 9 pm, is the last new-to-me title in the program. It stars Helen Walker (so good in Edmund Goulding’s 1947 Nightmare Alley) as an ex-con who is working with a gang of criminals to secure a perfume ingredient called myrrh. Now that one I’m SURE I’ve never seen. It seems to be the only movie directing credit for Rooney, and it’s described as “a true rarity.” At this point, I LIVE for true rarities!

If you can’t see EVERYTHING, and haven’t SEEN everything, I’ll recommend the classics that I consider among the bedrock of film noir. (But as I scan the list, I find it difficult to choose among this feast of films major and minor, well-known and unknown. Still, I narrowed it down to ten essentials out of twenty-four.)

Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947), showing on Saturday, January 25^th, at 1:30 PM, features the astonishing film debut of Richard Widmark as the terrifying, giggling Tommy Udo, co-starring heavy-lidded Victor Mature and Dark City Dame Coleen Gray. Later that same day, there’s the amazing evening double bill starting at 7:30 of Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), starring exquisite, duplicitous Jane Greer and heavy-lidded Robert Mitchum, and The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956), a racetrack heist movie with Sterling Hayden, the Dark City Dames Coleen Gray and Marie Windsor, and a fabulous supporting cast of character actors including Elisha Cook Jr., Jay C. Flippen, and Timothy Carey.

On Wednesday, January 29^th, at 7:30, the scrappy, astonishingly low-budget, quickly shot, propulsive 66-minute Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), starring Tom O’Neal, whose own life could be a film noir, and the scarily intense Ann Savage, is a defining tenet of film noir.

Thursday, January 30^th, at 7:30 pm, the double bill of two  lesser-known noirs, both of which I find extraordinarily sexy, will be revelatory to anyone who hasn’t seen them: The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949), starring the well-matched Joan Bennett and James Mason, two of the best voices in the business, in an intense and doomed relationship of intimidation that turns into complicity; and Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944), based on one of Cornell Woolrich’s nightmarish novels, and featuring sassy, underappreciated Ella Raines, who careens around Manhattan in an clock-is-ticking attempt to rescue her beloved boss from a death sentence.

Joan Bennett stars again on Friday, January 31^st, at 7:30 pm, in the essential Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944), with hapless Edward G. Robinson and skeevy Dan Duryea (I also recommend seeking out its sibling, Scarlet Street, made the next year with the same creative team, which I find even more delightful). It’s double-billed with Murder My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, starring crooner-turned-tough guy Dick Powell, Dark City Dame Claire Trevor, and burky Mike Mazurki, seeking a woman who was “cute as lace pants.”

On Saturday, February 1^st, at 7 pm, you can see a great personal favorite of mine, and a fairly recent addition to the noir canon, Cry Danger (Robert Parrish, 1951), again starring Dick Powell, immensely good with William Bowers’ trademark dry and witty dialogue, and featuring unusual LA locations.

And Noir City 22 goes out with a cynical bang: on Sunday, February 2^nd, you can see Evelyn Keyes in a scary relationship with creepy Van Heflin in The Prowler (Joseph Losey, 1951) at either 2 or 7 pm, and then at 4 or 9 pm, the under-appreciated-in-its-time Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival) (Billy Wilder, 1951), starring Kirk Douglas in a great performance as a ruthless reporter and Jan Sterling who gets off some of the best lines in noir – telling Douglas “I’ve heard of hard-boiled, but you – you’re twenty minutes.”

I’m pretty soft-boiled, myownself. And not fatale in the least. But for ten days in January and February, I’ll be enjoying the hard-boiled hell out of Noir City 22.

Check out our poster and trailer gallery for Noir City 22.

And don’t miss two new cocktails from Eddie Muller’s  Noir Bar recipe books for fine drinks to pair with your movies.

Meredith Brody, a graduate of both the Paris Cordon Bleu cooking school and USC film school, has been the restaurant critic for, among others, the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and SF Weekly, and has written for countless film magazines and websites including Cahiers du Cinema, Film Comment, and Indiewire. Her writings on books, theater, television, and travel have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Interview. She also contributes to EatDrinkFilms including her“Meals with Meredith,” where she talks about food and film with filmmakers at restaurants in northern California, writes about vintage cocktails and where she eats during film festivals at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. A selection of her EDF pieces are found here.

One could describe Meredith as “hooked on cinema” as she attends four-five films a day at many bay area and international festivals each year.  Somebody has to do it. Read about her journey back to festivals after two years in pandemic mode.

Note from Noir City

Our second ASK EDDIE for 2025 streams this Thursday, January 23, 7:00 pm PT on the Film Noir Foundation’s Facebook page. In this edition, we discuss the upcoming NOIR CITY 22 festival held at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre, noir films suitable for children, our favorite book-to-film noir adaptations, and Old Time Radio shows. 

ASK EDDIE premieres on Facebook this Thursday and becomes available on Friday, January 24, on our YouTube channel. If you enjoy what you see, we encourage you to like and subscribe. There are past editions available anytime.

Have a question for a future episode? Send it to askeddie@filmnoirfoundation.org.

Note: Eddie will not be able to answer questions posted during the program nor ones left on our social media accounts. So, make sure to send your questions to the ASK EDDIE email listed above.