The NW Film Center’s Black Christmas series begins tonight and runs through Sunday. If like Film noir, this is a perfect way to spend this Smowpocalyptic weekend.
- More Portland Events & Parties This Weekend here
- Grindhouse Film Festival: Silent Night, Deadly Night | December 21
From NW Film Center
Christmas, at best, has certainly lost some charm. It has become near impossible to avoid the tackier aspects of December, from your neighbor’s blinking plastic nativity scene to that Christmas card with all your aunt’s cats on it, so it’s no wonder that for even the best of us the holidays have come to evoke a bit of misanthropy.
It is in this spirit that the Northwest Film Center presents Black Christmas, a first class collection of tough-as-nails American noir films. As celebrations of the inner-holiday-sociopath in all of us, these films share an ability to probe with great excitement the darkest parts of our yuletide-psyche.
The series opens Friday, December 19th at 7PM with a double feature of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and the forgotten gem Blast of Silence. Boulevard has William Holden as a screenwriter on his last financial legs; he hasn’t sold a script in years and he’s about to have his car repossessed. He stumbles upon the all but abandoned mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a forgotten silent movie star on the edge of insanity. He takes a job helping her revise her hapless screenplay, but before he knows it, she has nearly taken over his life. Swanson swallows us into the depths of psychosis, from delusional and frightening to heartbreakingly vulnerable and back again.
Blast of Silence is perhaps the perfect dose of Christmas cynicism. It follows professional hitman Frankie Bono (Allen Baron, who also wrote and directed) on his return to New York City after fleeing it and the orphanage he grew up in years before. His job, to silence another mobster on Christmas day, would be dark enough without his inner-monologue; a driving, gutter-throated narration of sweet nothings like “You’re alone now, just like when you were born!” A series of miraculous tracking shots of Frankie walking a snow-dusted Times Square on Christmas eve illuminate his dread and alienation. The tension then becomes almost as existential as it is palpable, leading all the way up to his dark, inevitable deed.
There’s nothing like the darkness exposed in an Alfred Hitchcock double feature. Strangers on a Train (Saturday,December 20th at 7PM) has an ineffable ability to crawl under the skin. When Bruno Anthony (a morose Robert Walker) approaches Guy Haines (everyman Farley Granger) his plan is simple: the two swap murders. Bruno will kill Haines’ adulterous wife, thus freeing him to marry the woman he truly loves, if Haines kills Bruno’s father, thus realizing his miserable Freudian nightmare. Walker evokes the king of creeps – his figure, dressed in black suit, tie and slippery black gloves, is haunting – while Hitchcock tightens the screws with every scene. Followed by The Wrong Man, which walks us step by step through the horrors of mistaken identity. With Henry Fonda as the long-faced musician Manny Balestrero, wrongfully arrested on suspicion of holding up an insurance company.
Asphalt Jungle (Sunday, December 21st at 7PM) is enduringly efficient – a sharp realist drama of criminal psychology and police corruption. There is no score to speak of – many scenes, including an unforgettable million-dollar jewelry heist, are hushed and almost serene – but the film is punctuated with emotionally potent ensemble performances from Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, a young Marilyn Monroe and more. Violent moments are as abrupt and unsettling as raw scenes of humanity and compassion; each character’s depths are realized as they sink into their own crooked fates. Director John Huston said it himself, “You may not like these characters, but you will find them fascinating.”
With LOVE tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and HATE on the other, Robert Mitchum terrorizes every corner of Night of the Hunter (Friday, December 26th at 7PM). He plays Harry Powell, a dangerous conman passing for a preacher, in pursuit of John and Pearl, two children hiding the location of their deceased father’s fortune. As Powell begins to romance their mother in an effort to uncover thousands of dollars in stolen money, John’s responsibility is that given by many late fathers to their sons: he must protect his sister and an ill-gotten fortune from the guy moving in on his mom. He and Pearl escape along the Ohio River, a journey of lyrical beauty ala Huckleberry Finn, but their coming of age is marred by the uncompromising insanity of Mitchum. Hunter has the rare distinction of being a direct influence on everything from Malick’s Day’s of Heaven to Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, while also being Charles Laughton’s only directorial effort. As part of a double feature, followed by hard boiled murder mystery Cop Hater at 8:45.
Also screening as part of Black Christmas:
- Double Feature of Cry Terror! on Saturday, December 27th at 7PM, followed by The Night has a Thousand Eyes at 9PM
- Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall star in Howard Hawks’ masterpiece The Big Sleep (Sunday, December 28th at 7PM)
– by Jeff Guay
All screenings held at the Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Avenue
Adult: 8$
Student/Senior: 7$
Double features cost an additional 2$ to stay for the second film
Free to all PSU students, faculty and staff
Northwest Film Center
1219 SW Park Avenue
Portland, OR 97205
503.221.1156
www.nwfilm.org
