The Brooklyn Rail

In the 1960s and 70s, Eddie Muller grew up in the shadow of his father, a sportswriter in San Francisco. The period was a time of great change for the Bay Area, when the hardboiled city gave way to the Summer of Love. But the old world was still visible to Eddie through the circles his father traveled. When they’d go to restaurants, “all the guys” would come up and greet his father. “He was treated like a big wheel,” Muller said. “Like something right out of a film noir.”

The childhood experience of witnessing that disappearing world contributed to Muller’s lifelong passion for film noir, a genre that provided a lens into what mid-twentieth century America was like. Muller’s forays into “noirchaeology” led him to publish the 1998 book, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. As part of the book’s promotion, Muller hosted a noir festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. The festival was a hit, so Muller decided to continue the event on an annual basis and use the proceeds to create the Film Noir Foundation, dedicated to restoring lost films in the genre. For two decades, Muller has organized the Noir City Film Festival, touring the Bay Area, Hollywood, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC; in 2017 Muller became the host of the TCM program Noir Alley.

Today, we may know noir best as the cinematic world of weary detectives and femme fatales, but noir’s attributes are fungible, occasionally intersecting with other genres such as musicals and westerns, making it one of cinema’s most durable and popular storytelling modes. In the present-day, noir has left its influence on films as varied as Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016), David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake (2018), and even the John Wick series. And though noir is typically associated with the Hollywood cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, Muller said films in the noir style have been made all over the world. Taken together, Muller characterized noir as a global artistic movement that explores “tales in which the protagonists are the bad guys. These are stories where the artists are intentionally making you empathize with people doing the wrong thing.”

That empathy runs deep. And at Noir City, interest in antiheroes can also give way to nostalgia for yesterday’s fashions. Like other genre celebrations in which fans participate in cosplay, at Noir City you might run into a few enthusiasts dressed in period suits and fedoras. And yes, at the festival you can buy a variety of noir-centric merchandise and gifts, including Eddie Muller’s backlist, featuring a children’s book (Kid Noir: Kitty Feral and the Case of the Marshmallow Monkey) and a book of noir cocktail recipes (Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar).

The 2023 iteration of Noir City in DC ran from October 13–26 at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland. The festival focused on films from the year 1948 (seventy-five years ago), which happened to be the height of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anti-Communist investigations into Hollywood. “Film noir became the lightning rod for artists suspected of being fellow travelers or outright Communists,” Muller said, arguing that the genre was often a vehicle for left-leaning artists to critique big business and capitalist greed. Three years out from the conclusion of World War II, 1948 was also the first year when filmmakers felt they could “start asking harder questions about what happened, and the effect of serving in the war.”

One of the festival showings that dealt with the problems of World War II veterans was Act of Violence (1948), screened on a 35mm print. The Fred Zinnemann film follows Frank (Van Heflin) a former American prisoner-of-war in Germany, now leading a prosperous life in Southern California, married to a twenty-two-year-old Janet Leigh. But a moral error in that POW camp haunts him in the form of his former comrade, Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan). Parkson seeks to kill Frank for betraying his escape plan to the Nazi guards, leading to the deaths of his companions. The ensuing crisis of the soul leads to the protagonist’s nervous breakdown—a screaming jog through the 2nd Street Tunnel, followed by a suicide attempt. Despite the gravity of the melodrama, moments of unintentional comedy often resonated with the festival attendees, proving that the film’s age, like that of a fine wine, had produced unexpected notes and flavors. The AFI audience laughed heartily at one point, when Leigh’s character nonchalantly abandons her infant child in her house unattended.

According to Muller, Act of Violence was “the only film noir directed by Fred Zinnemann, who would go on to become one of the A-list directors in Hollywood.” Zinnemann was Jewish and from Vienna; he immigrated to the US in the 1920s; his parents were killed in the Holocaust. Zinnemann went on to direct a variety of prominent films across genres—including High Noon (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), and The Day of the Jackal (1973).

The contemporary Key Largo (1948), John Huston’s star-studded classic which followed Act of Violence in the festival’s programming, served as another example of how 1948 was an inflection point for considering the impact of the war—as well as the final of four films in which celebrity couple Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall co-starred. In this one, Bogart plays a returning veteran drifting through the Florida Keys, stopping at a hotel owned by the family of one of his fallen comrades, whose widow (Bacall) is predictably intrigued by Bogart. Then, a Cuba-based gangster (Edward G. Robinson) arrives and holds the hotel hostage as a hurricane unleashes outside. The Bogart character’s initial passivity in the face of the gangster forms the central dynamic in the story—only in the finale does he take decisive action and overcome his wartime trauma. Based on a Maxwell Anderson play set after the Spanish Civil War, the conflict was updated to World War II for the film adaptation.

One of the festival’s curiosities was The Velvet Touch (1948), also presented on 35mm, a lost film starring Rosalind Russell that, even in the eyes of festival presenter Foster Hirsch, may well have its reasons for being forgotten. “I had not only never seen the film,” Hirsh said in his introduction, but he added that he didn’t “even remember hearing about it.” In her early career, Russell was the star of hit comedies like His Girl Friday, but she wanted to pursue more dramatic roles. In 1947, Russell and her husband Frederick Brisson adapted the Eugene O’Neill play Mourning Becomes Electra, which Hirsch considered a disaster. “If she thought she could play a tragic Eugene O’Neill heroine, she was wrong,” Hirsch said. “She couldn’t do it.”

The Velvet Touch was Russell’s second attempt to crack a dramatic role, and the story centers around the New York theater world. In the movie, Russell plays an actor who accidentally kills her producer and plays a cat-and-mouse game with a Poirot-esque detective played by Sydney Greenstreet. In the end, Hirsch argued, The Velvet Touch was overshadowed by the similar thematic terrain tread by the more successful All About Eve, and Russell returned to comedy.

For Eddie Muller, whether he’s screening a classic or a lost film, it’s all about awakening a new generation to the power of noir. “If you’ve seen me introduce movies, you know that I stand up there and I say, who has never seen a movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall?” Muller explained. “And when I see twelve people raise their hands, that’s what gets me excited. We’re going to do it right. It’s going to be on a big screen. It’s going to be Key Largo.”