Anticipating This Year’s Music-Themed Fest With Delight

by Meredith Brody.  (January 13,2026)

I love Eddie Muller’s Noir City film festivals; I don’t think I’ve missed a one since his first edition in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque in 1999, four years before SF’s first Noir City.

I start out perusing the list of 24 films (paired in a dozen double bills) in my usual somewhat-blinkered and mildly narcissistic fashion: which ones are new to me? Since I’ve been seeking out film noir since before I went to college, and my first post-college publication in book form was in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s first “Encyclopedia of Film Noir” back in 1979, it’s not totally a surprise that there are only two that qualify: the British Face the Music aka The Deadly Glove (1954), and The Crimson Canary (1945), neither of which I’ve even heard of.

At first I’m somewhat disappointed. I’m always thirsty for the shock of the new. (Especially the new-to-me old movies.) But then I look seriously at the line-up, and my spirits lift almost immediately.

There are several  movies that I first discovered on television, under the kind auspices of TCM, that astonished me at the time: Blues in the Night (1941), which Muller calls “the first jazz noir”), which is fortuitously paired on opening night, Friday January 16^th, with Black Angel (1946), another jazz noir based on one of the quintessential noir fiction writers, Cornell Woolrich. (Over 40 movies have been based on his short stories and novels; he was so prolific that his two pseudonyms, George Hopley and William Irish, have lengthy bibliographies.) Blues in the Night was adapted by Robert Rossen (later to direct such noir films as Johnny O’Clock and Body and Soul) from a play by Edwin Gilbert, directed by Anatole Litvack (whose other noir credits include Out of the Fog and Sorry, Wrong Number). Future directors acted in the movie: Richard Whorf, whose most noir-identified credits out of his 47 are his three episodes of Johnny Staccato (1960), a jazz noir series itself, starring John Cassavetes as a piano-playing LA detective. And Elia Kazan, many of whose movies are dark if not precisely noir, as perhaps only his early film Boomerang is in its entirety. I remember being knocked out by how complex and dark and political the story of Blues in the Night is, and how beautifully shot by Ernie Haller, Warner Brothers stalwart and Bette Davis’s favorite cinematographer.

I was so excited watching it by myself on TV that I can hardly wait to see it on the Grand Lake’s truly big screen, my spirits and reactions buoyed by a full and exquisitely responsive audience, many of them discovering it for the first time. It screens at 9 pm after Black Angel at 7:15 on opening night, Friday January 16^th.

Another movie I also know well from TV but have never seen with an audience is All Night Long. I actually think that I turned on the set with the idea that I’d be watching Jean-Claude Tramont’s All Night Long, a 1982 film maudit starring Barbra Streisand, Gene Hackman, and Dennis Quaid that I remember fondly, but I stuck around when a black-and-white British movie started unspooling instead. I liked everything about it: its chic setting, a multi-level sophisticated studio in an industrial neighborhood owned by a creepy rich guy (Richard Attenborough) who’s throwing a wedding anniversary party complete with jam session for a mixed-race couple, the bandleader Aurelius Rx and his very pale blonde wife, Delia, a singer. Patrick McGoohan wants Delia to sing with his new band, but she refuses. McGoohan then poisonously attempts to break up the couple. I was distracted by the appearances of John Dankworth, Dave Brubeck, and the very charismatic Charles Mingus, but slowly the Shakespearian allusions began to unfold for me. (Fun fact: Delia is played by the ethereal, almost translucent Marti Stevens, whose father was the tough MGM producer Nicholas Schenck.)

All Night Long is wittily paired with yet another Sixties jazz noir, A Man Called Adam (1966), with wiry Sammy Davis Jr. as the titular Adam, a gifted jazz cornetist who is also gifted at messing up his life. Directed by Leo Penn (yes, Sean’s father), and the double bill screens starting at 7:15 pm on Tuesday, January 20^th.

The more I studied the program, the more excited I got. I realized that many of the movies programmed I had seen most recently on TV, and I was longing to replace those memories with big screen ones. (I can often talk myself into going to an oft-seen classic, such as To Have and Have Not or Sweet Smell of Success, by thinking “When will I have another chance to see it on the big screen?” Gather ye film noir while ye may, in January.)   In fact, I was lucky that several of them that I had coincidentally seen on TV in recent months (again, via TCM) — The Strip, Pete Kelly’s Blues, The Man With the Golden Arm – I had only watched with one eye, which is easy to do when the TV is in a room stocked with a computer, and hundreds of books, magazines, and newspapers (none of which will distract me in the Grand Lake).

To Have and Have Not (1944) stars, of course, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in their first movie together, directed by Howard Hawks, slightly based on the Hemingway novel, and the music is provided by the delightful Hoagy Carmichael (who Ian Fleming modeled James Bond’s face upon); it’s paired with the considerably less-well-known (not to say obscure) Nocturne (1946), starring George Raft (whose refused roles gave Bogart his career) as a composer/pianist who’s pegged for a murder he did not commit. Produced by Hitchcock stalwart Joan Harrison and written by prolific novelist/ screenwriter Jonathan Latimer. The two screen as a Saturday matinee on the 17^th of January at 1:15 pm.

Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), set in a gritty bad neighborhood of Chicago, is double billed with Alexander Mackendrick’s The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), taking place in glittery midtown New York. Drugs figure in both, with Frank Sinatra hooked on heroin – Golden Arm having a double or even triple meaning, because he’s a gifted drummer, but also a gifted card dealer, whose arm is shot full of expensive drugs. And when famed New York columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster at his most chilling) wants to separate his sister from her suitor, jazz guitarist Martin Milner, his minion, publicist Sidney Falco, only has to insinuate that Milner has smoked dope to ruin him. The script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets has as many quotable lines as any Shakespeare play. “Cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.” (Sidney Falco) The two play Thursday January 22^nd at 7 pm.

Eddie Muller and his cohorts must have had some fun putting together this program. It’s not all jazz noir: as Muller points out, “Jazz may dominate the program, but we’ve also got samplings of classical (1946’s Humoresque), country (1958’s Thunder Road), and rock ‘n’ roll (1958’s King Creole) — I finally hit on a theme that accommodates my favorite Elvis movie.”

King Creole is partnered with Thunder Road (also 1958) on Friday January 23^rd at 7 pm – two heavy-lidded sexy singing brunettes in blue jeans: Elvis, and Robert Mitchum, who wrote and sang Thunder Road’s theme song.

The frenetic, multi-talented Mickey Rooney stars in The Strip (1951) as a drummer accused of murdering a showgirl. It’s paired with the highly-anticipated (by me, anyway) and unknown British Face the Music (1954) by famed Hammer horror director Terence Fisher. The double bill plays Monday January 19^th at 7:30 pm.

The other new-one-on-me, The Crimson Canary (1945), is paired with another singing thrush, Ann Sheridan as the femme fatale Nora Prentiss (1947), set in San Francisco.  I’m excited by the prospect of seeing Coleman Hawkins and Josh White in The Crimson Canary. The double bill plays at 7 pm on Saturday January 24.

A day later the festival wraps with two neo-noirs: Robert Altman’s rarely-seen Kansas City (1996), with Altman’s typically diverse and interesting cast, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Belafonte, Michael Murphy, and Steve Buscemi, running around Kansas City in the 30s. Bertrand Tavernier’s popular but again rarely-screened nowadays Round Midnight (1986) stars Dexter Gordon, a real jazz saxophonist (Long Tall Dexter!) who returns to New York from his life in Paris. Co-star Herbie Hancock composed the score. The double bill plays twice, as a matinee at 1:00 pm  and at night at 6 pm.

As it turns out, I’m looking forward to these ten days of Noir City blues and jazz and classical and country and rock’n’roll as much if not more than any other Noir City festival that has kept me off the streets and distracted from the very black things that are going on in the world today. (Viva the demonstrations that go on at the very corner that the Grand Lake occupies – weekly or lately more frequently.) And I didn’t even mention The Man I Love! (Saturday January 17^that 7 pm.) Or Love Me or Leave Me! (Wednesday, January 21st, at 7 pm.) Or Young Man with a Horn (Sunday, January 18^th, at 3:45 and 8:45 pm, whose lesbian scenes still astonish me). As I always recommend: buy a Passport, and see EVERYTHING. Music makes the noir world go round.

For the complete film schedule, the nightly live music before films, and everything “Noir City” go to the official website.

Buying a Passport is a great way to save money and see a lot of movies.

Eddie Muller’s website.

Eddie Muller Hosts “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies every weekend. Find out more here.

The Film Noir Foundation is the host of Noir City, supporting not only the Festival but restorations of classic films and published a great virtual magazine four times a year.

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.