upcoming

Film Noir Night

What:

Film Noir Pint and Nacho Night featuring Detour (1945) and D.O.A. (1950), plus shorts, trailers, giveaways and prizes Wednesday, February 10, at Arcata Theatre Lounge, 1036 G St. in Arcata. Doors open from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., cost is free with $5 minimum purchase of food or beverage and is all ages. Sponsored by La Dolce Video!

D.O.A. (1950), a film noir drama film directed by Rudolph Maté, is considered a classic of the genre. “I want to report a murder…mine.” So begins D.O.A. Told in flashback, the story tells of how vacationing CPA Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) becomes the recipient of a deadly poison known as iridium. Told by a doctor that he hasn’t long to live, Bigelow desperately retraces his movements of the previous 24 hours, trying to locate his murderer. The frantically-paced plot revolves around a doomed man’s quest to find out who has poisoned him – and why – before he dies.

In 2004, D.O.A. was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Detour (1945) is a film noir cult classic that stars Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake and Edmund MacDonald, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and released by the Producers Releasing Corporation, one of the so-called “poverty row” film studios in mid-twentieth century Hollywood. In flashback, New York nightclub pianist Al Roberts hitchhikes to Hollywood to join his girl Sue. On a rainy night, the sleazy gambler he’s riding with mysteriously dies; afraid of the police, Roberts takes the man’s identity. But thanks to a blackmailing dame, Roberts’ every move plunges him deeper into trouble… Produced as a B-movie, Detour was shot in six days for about $20,000, a low budget for the 1940s. With re-shoots out of the question for such a low budget movie, director Edgar G. Ulmer put storytelling above continuity, such as flipping the negative for some of the hitchhiking scenes. This showed the westbound New York to Los Angeles travel of the character with a right-to-left flow across the screen, but also made cars seem to be driving on the “wrong” side of the road, with the hitchhiker getting into the car on the driver’s side.

“…Detour remains a masterpiece of its kind. There have been hundreds of better movies, but none with the feel for doom portrayed by … Ulmer. The random universe Stephen Crane warned us about—the berserk cosmic impulse that causes earthquakes and famine and AIDS—is nowhere better depicted than in the scene where Tom Neal stands by the roadside, soaking in the midnight rain, feeling for the first time the noose drawing tighter and tighter around his neck.” - Novelists Edward Gorman and Dow Mossman

When/where: