CineSavant Column
Hello!
It’s time to tell Los Angeles fans that Noir City Hollywood is back in town again for the next two weekends. They really know how to put on a show — the traveling festival will light up the Egyptian Theater on March 20-23 and March 27-30, with a full roster of 23 features.
The theme this year is Femmes Fatale, in keeping with Eddie Muller’s book Dark City Dames. The special treat promised will be in-person appearances by Annette Bening and Jennifer Tilly,
The women-in-noir celebration begins with an Ida Lupino thriller — projected on nitrate. Appreciative Noir Fans seem to be everywhere, turning out for Noir City festivals across the country. Full details for our Hollywood gathering are at the American Cinematheque site:
Doing its educational bit for the ongoing fight against fascism, TIME magazine online offers this short but good historical article by Chris Yogerst on the fine record of Warner Bros. in the 1930s, to galvanize American opposition to Hitler’s Germany. The personality in focus is the studio’s founder Harry Warner. He led a coaliton of Hollywood bigwigs to fund investigations of subversive organizations like the Silver Shirts and the German American Bund.
Last year I read a thorough history of the Hollywood’s anti-Nazi counter-espionage effort, Steven J. Ross’s book Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.
Brought up in the article is the fact that Warners produced the first big anti-Nazi movie, Confessions of Nazi Spy. Its advertising didn’t shy away from the attack, with the tagline “The pictures that calls a Swastika a SWASTIKA!” Groucho Marx is quoted as saying that Warner Bros. was “the only studio with any guts.” From March 6, the TIME article:
Advisor and all-round sage Gary Teetzel informs us of an upcoming disc set of interest from Radiance. Twenty years ago we finally caught up with Der Verlorene, aka The Lost One, starring Peter Lorre. Produced in Germany, the 1951 drama was always noted for two things — 1.) it was the only film directed by Peter Lorre, and — 2.) it was really difficult to see.
We learned firsthand about the ‘hard to see’ part when the ratty video copy we found turned out to be a poor transfer, with possible missing scenes. Its subtitles didn’t cover all the dialogue and didn’t feel accurate anyway. We couldn’t tell if the movie was good or bad — it certainly seemed intense. Our screening mostly told us that, you know, it would be really nice to see Der Verlorene for real sometime.
An opportunity to do that is a couple of months away. The UK company Radiance has announced their World Noir Vol. 3 disc set. Radiance’s pub copy says that a fully restored encoding of Peter Lorre’s one directing effort will share the box with two other highly-regarded thrillers from France and Sweden. The extras might will clear up some of the stories we’ve heard aboutDer Verlorene. The one most repeated is that something (a fire?) forced Lorre and producer Arnold Pressburger to reshoot some or all of the picture.
Radiance has its full fact sheet up for the disc set, which appears to be All-Region. The release date is still a ways off, June 25, so we’ll be checking up on its progress:
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson