Day 9 of Noirvember: Noir City Chicago 2019

Noir City, in case you’re not familiar, is the world’s largest annual film noir festival, and is presented by the Film Noir Foundation. The event started 17 years ago in San Francisco, and is now held in cities throughout the nation, including Los Angeles, Detroit, and my sweet home, Chicago. On today’s date two months ago, I attended a double feature at the Noir City Chicago festival, where I saw A Kiss Before Dying (1956) and The Killing (1957). Today’s Noirvember post focuses on this noirish experience.

I attended the screening with my oldest daughter, Veronica, and before the first film, I had the great pleasure of meeting in person, for the first time, a member of my Dark Pages newsletter staff, Andy Wolverton, who is also the author of the Journeys in Darkness and Light blog. I also got the opportunity to chat with my longtime pal, Film Noir Foundation Treasurer Alan Rode, who introduced the evening’s movies.

A Kiss Before Dying is a rare color noir, based on the first novel written by Ira Levin, who also penned Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. (If you’ve never read his books, I highly recommend them – you only owe it to yourself.) The film stars Robert Wagner as Bud Corliss, a college student with designs on classmate Dorrie Kingship (Joanne Woodward), less for her delightful appearance and personality than for the fortune promised by her father’s copper mine. When the couple discovers that Dorrie is pregnant, Bud is reluctant to marry her, as Dorrie is certain that she will be disinherited. So he finds another solution to the problem. And that’s just the beginning.

Wagner, Rode said, played a “real son of a bitch.”

According to Rode, movies were starting to change by the mid-1950s.

“In Kiss Before Dying, you really see this portrait of America: button-down, well-to-to, the behavior of the societal norms,” Rode said. “Nobody better to turn that stereotype on its head than Robert Wagner. [The film] really gave him an opportunity to stretch, to play someone who’s a real son of a bitch.”

Others in the film’s cast included Jeffrey Hunter, playing a part-time professor at the college who figures prominently in the proceedings, George Macready as Dorrie’s father, and Mary Astor as Wagner’s mother. Rode recalled an interview he conducted several years ago with Robert Wagner, who he termed “one of the nicest people inside or outside show business.” Rode asked Wagner what it was like to have Mary Astor as his mother, and Wagner (with a nod to Astor’s appearance in The Maltese Falcon) replied, “It’s the stuff dreams are made of.”

The movie was directed by Gerd Oswald, in his first big chance at a feature film, Rode said. Previously, Oswald had served as assistant director or second assistant director on such films as Sunset Boulevard, Niagara, and A Place in the Sun. Unfortunately, as the studio system collapsed, Oswald, like many other feature film directors, ended up in television.

“Marie Windsor and Elisha Cook, Jr. — it doesn’t get any better than that,” Rode said.

The next film, The Killing, is one of my all-time favorite noirs, and I was absolutely thrilled to see it on the big screen for the first time. Along with The Asphalt Jungle, Rode called The Killing one of the two greatest heist films. I concur absolutely. Both films, incidentally, starred Sterling Hayden.

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, The Killing uses an unusual time-skipping format to tell the story of a motley crew of men who unite to pull off an intricately planned heist of the proceeds at a racetrack. Despite the careful planning, though, things don’t exactly turn out as the participants would have wanted.

Rode posited that Kubrick did his best work in his films of the 1950s and 1960s, sharing that The Killing was made for $330,000. He said that the cast of the movie was a veritable Hall of Fame of character actors, including Elisha Cook, Jr., Ted de Corsia, Jay C. Flippen, Jay Adler, Tito Vuolo, and Joe Turkel who, at age 92, is still with us.

On the distaff side, the cast included Marie Windsor and second-billed Coleen Gray, who once told Rode, “I got the billing, but it’s really Marie’s picture.”

Attending the Noir City Chicago festival is one of the high points of my year, and this year’s event was no different. If you have a Noir City festival offered in a city near you, and you’ve never been, treat yourself next year and go. You won’t be sorry.

And join me tomorrow for Day 10 of Noirvember!

~ by shadowsandsatin on November 9, 2019.