Thursday, September 27, 2007

Extra Weekend Event!

I just received the Museum of the Moving Image's weekly email and saw that they are showing several excellent noir films by the great Fritz Lang this weekend. Here's the lineup:

Saturday, September 29

4:30 p.m.
THE BLUE GARDENIA
Fritz Lang, King of Noir
1953, 90 mins. 16mm. With Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern. Unsure if she murdered a man the drunken night before, a telephone operator falls for the reporter covering the story. In Lang's penetrating and paranoid view of post-war American bachelor culture, the heroine has to fend off predatory men- including the reporter, who wants to convict her, and marry her.

6:30 p.m.
THE BIG HEAT
Fritz Lang, King of Noir
1953, 89 mins. 35mm. With Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin. Lang's 1950s masterpiece chronicles corruption through all levels of American society, as an honest cop takes the law into his own hands after his wife is killed and he is removed from the force.

Sunday, September 30

3:00 p.m.
WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS
Fritz Lang, King of Noir
1956, 100 mins. 35mm. With Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming. Lang surveys the entanglements of a team of reporters united professionally even as they backstab each other personally. Meanwhile, a serial killer stalks in the background. Lang's ensemble thriller/comedy/media satire/anti-romance was one of his favorites of his films.

5:00 p.m.
BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT
Fritz Lang, King of Noir
1956, 80 mins. Archival 35mm print from George Eastman House. A reporter (Dana Andrews) attempting to expose problems with the judicial system frames himself for murder, but the evidence to prove him innocent goes up in smoke. No other work so clearly displays Lang's passion for plot twists, as the audience and the protagonist find themselves trapped in a series of tales within tales.

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