I Wake Up Dreaming: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir at the Roxie

[At left, the cover of Eliot Lavine's new book; at right, a random page from within.]

Starting tomorrow night and running for fifteen days, the Roxie will host a film noir series for the first time in years, a series focused on the kind of low-budget B films that are rarely shown or much talked about. The curator, Eliot Lavine, is a true expert on this esoteric area of film noir, and is such a die-hard noir buff that he seems drawn to noirish stories in real life as well as those resting in film canisters: when I spoke to him in the lobby of the Roxie one April afternoon, he brought up the Craigslist Killer, who had just been caught that week, and discussed the details of the case with me almost as if he were talking about one of the films being featured.

During our interview, the classic Repeat Performance (playing May 24th) was rolling in the screening room next door; an appropriate coincidence, because this series is itself something of an encore for Lavine. As a programming director at the Roxie from 1990 to 2003, he organized an annual film noir series that proved popular with audiences, despite the fact that the first, crazily ambitious series in 1991 ran for thirty days, and showed sixty films.

This program differs from the one at the Castro in two ways. First, it exploits a hidden strength of the Roxie: its long, narrow screening room and relatively small screen are ideally suited for projecting 16mm prints. “Ninety-nine per cent of this festival is 16mm TV prints,” which he borrowed from a small group of collector friends eager to participate. “Otherwise,” Lavine said, most of these films “are not even remotely available.” Noir fans have heard of many of these B films but, for the most part, haven’t seen them due to the rarity of prints.

The second way it differs from the Film Noir Foundation’s show at the Castro is in its focus on this particular area of film noir, as opposed to presenting a mixture of classics and obscurities.  That several well-known classics are shown each year at the Castro has created an opportunity for Lavine to go beyond the obvious programming and dip into an archive of films hailing from, as he wonderfully put it, “the ninth circle of dark weirdness.”

“Some of them are great,” he continued, “and some of them are beyond great: completely essential for an understanding of the style. You really have to get below the surface and jump into the deep end of the pool.” The well-known films are “the kings, but it’s the princes you want to swing with, because those are the really dirty, nasty, obscure, difficult, totally subversive movies from that outer realm, like The Devil Thumbs a Ride,” of which Lavine is showing a beautiful 16mm print. “They never would have been able to get away with that kind of moral tone in an A film.” 

Alongside this series, Lavine is selling a self-published book, the cover and an inner page of which are reproduced above, with his permission. TV Noir is made up of clippings from about a thousand 1950s- and 1960s-era issues of TV Guide, eighty pages of strange, amusing, and sometimes disturbing blurbs for horror, sci-fi, or noir films. The blurb on the last page was what inspired him to create the book: a film called Tormented is described only as: “A girl’s body is found floating in the surf.”

“I’ve seen that film,” Lavine said, “and this is a really eerie way to describe it. That scene happens in the course of the story, but if I were writing a blurb, I wouldn’t be inclined to summarize the movie with it. But there’s something kind of peaceful and poetic and dark about the image. So I started thinking, whoever wrote that — what weird, dark thing was going through their brain at the moment they wrote it?” Although he thinks that every film shown in the series is in the book someplace, most of them were “sub-B and gone for the ages.” Lavine gave me a copy, and I’ve found it reminiscent of Felix Feneon’s Novels in Three Lines, where one little story after another blurs together and becomes a strange kind of dream. “So many of these things, you read it, and you wind up thinking about a two-line description of some lost movie, and suddenly you’re lost in it for forty minutes.” You can visit the website for the book here.

The series kicks off with a reception Thursday, May 14th starting at 7:00, and will feature “wine, music, merriment,” and more, including a screening of the 1961 British noir, All Night Long, a retelling of Othello. Each evening presents a double feature for $10, and on the weekends there are double matinees as well as evening shows.

posted: 09 May 13
under: The Next Frame