NOIRvember

a Zero Hour Film presentation
at Pleasant Street Theater

Join us each Saturday in November for a midnight screening of select Film Noir gems, preceded by a cliff-hanger episode of the 1937 Dick Tracy serial!

The Naked Kiss
Saturday, Nov. 7 midnight only!
Special Admission $3

Sam Fuller's full blown pulp melodrama is straight off the pages of dime-store crime magazines, where all women were dames and all men were heels.  His use of arty compositions and artificial dialogue prove once again that people only talk like this in his movies.  Kelly, a former prostitute, is a woman caught between two worlds controlled by men.  In Grantville, a suburb where nobody knows her and everyone is artificially decent, she is able to live a righteous life, quoting Goethe and teaching cripples to walk.  The infiltration goes smoothly until she discovers a shocking murder scene and her cover begins to unravel.  With Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley and Michael Dante.  Director Sam Fuller.  1964, 90 mins.

Detour
Saturday, Nov. 14  midnight only!
Special Admission $3.00

What can you say about a 69-minute grade-Z production from 1945 starring a catatonic unknown (Tom Neal) and the most metaphysically distressing actress ever to grace an American film (Ann Savage) that takes place mainly in front of a rear projection screen and a progression of minimally rendered motel rooms and roadside diners—except that it's one of the most daring and thoroughly perverse works of art ever to come out of Hollywood? The director was Edgar G. Ulmer, a master of cinematic stylization too long underappreciated.  Al (Tom Neal) a down-and-out piano player, hitchhikes from New York to Los Angeles in order to be with his singer girlfriend (Claudia Drake). Fate has other plans for Al when he steps into the car of a character named Haskel (Edmund MacDonald), who promptly dies in his sleep one night while Al is driving. Afraid the cops will never believe the truth, Al takes Haskell's money, car, and identity, and tries to make it to Los Angeles, only to have fate intervene again when he picks up a mean-spirited female hitchhiker (Ann Savage).  Edgar G. Ulmer.  1945, 69 mins.

Kansas City Confidential
Saturday, Nov 21 at midnight only!
Special admission $3.00

This cult favorite opens with a Kansas City armored-car robbery perpetrated by cynical, corrupt ex-policeman Timothy Foster (Preston S. Foster). Foster devises an outrageous scheme: he will recruit three of the most vicious and unrelenting criminals he can find (screen heavies Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam and Neville Brand) to undertake a robbery, blackmailing them into the heist with incriminating evidence from other "jobs."  The heist comes off without a scratch, but a complication arises when the ignorant cops pick up an unrelated fellow, Joe Rolfe (John Payne) for his ownership of a van similar to the one used in the caper.  Now he wants to find the real criminals!  Though produced under the Hays Code censorship regulations, Kansas City Confidential constituted one of the most brutal and violent crime pictures made up through that time.
Director Phil Karlson.  1952, 99 mins.

Hitch-hiker
Saturday, Nov. 28 at midnight only!
Special Admission $3.00

Actress Ida Lupino (High Sierra) enjoyed a second career as a director of B movies in the late 40s and early 50s, and this hell-for-leather 1953 noir demonstrates her facility with actors and flawless pacing. Two pals (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy, both excellent) head off for a fishing trip in Mexico but get carjacked south of the border by a fish-eyed serial killer (William Talman, later the DA on the Perry Mason series). There's a subplot in which the authorities close in on the fugitive, but Lupino, who cowrote the script, devotes most of the screen time to the fear, rage, and despair of the two friends, who realize they're marked for death.  Director Ida Lupino.  1953, 71 mins.