Seattle Dispatch. 5.

I'd like to single out GreenCine friend and contributor Eddie Muller for bringing a couple of film noir rarities to the festival Sunday afternoon. Both have played in Muller's own San Francisco festival but were treats to see up here in rain city. Felix Feist's The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950), the sole film produced by Warner son Jack M Warner, has been unavailable in 35mm until UCLA acquired a print from France within the last year. The film, starring the unlikely romantic pairing of Lee J Cobb as a cop who "slums" with high society and Jane Wyatt as a flighty rich dame with street-level taste in men, is not a particularly gripping, stylistically exciting or narratively compelling example of the genre, at least until the last reel. When the fleeing couple detour into Fort Point, an abandoned brick structure with a courtyard that suggests Alcatraz, the entire atmosphere is transformed as if Feist was suddenly inspired by the possibilities of this astounding location. And it doesn't end there. Where so many Hollywood films opt out at the coda for a forced happy ending, the exchange in the final scene says more about the crazy illogic of passion and the compromises we make - and don't make - than many films in their full running time.

The second feature, Ted Tetzlaff's The Window, was presented by Muller as the first restoration from his non-profit organization, the Film Noir Foundation. Though not as rare, the print was sterling and the film itself, a thriller about an adolescent boy (Bobby Driscoll) who's cried wolf so often that when he witnesses a murder no one believes him (except the killers), is a much tighter and more gripping film, enhanced by marvelous location shooting in New York. The labyrinth of fire escapes and rooftop pathways creates a second city known only to the denizens of the low-rent district, and the tenement building where he lives feels too dumpy and dreary to be a Hollywood set (if it is, it's a tribute to the designers). I'm happy to say that both films filled SIFF's showcase theater, The Egyptian, to the rafters (or at least to the balcony) on an otherwise temperate spring Sunday afternoon, and the Muller charmed the audiences with his passionate and witty introductions.

On a more recent note... A smash hit in France (there's already a sequel in the works), OSS 117: Nest of Spies made its North American premiere at SIFF to a sold-out crowd that tapped right into the spy spoof's tongue-in-cheek yet barbed commentary on western arrogance in the Arab world. Jean Dujardin (looking like a perfect beefcake 60s-era Connery knock-off, right down the smirk) plays the Bond-like French secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, alias OSS 117, a culturally illiterate colonial agent sent to Egypt as it prepares to nationalize the Suez Canal. The idiot super-patriot has an IQ that matches his belt size and the cultural sensitivity of Bill O'Reilly, and he's also apparently irresistible to women and wears a tux like he was born in it. For all of the comic shtick, from a Nazi splinter group hiding in the pyramids to a ruthless war between rival poultry companies, it eschews Airplane absurdism for the oblivious bluster of 117 and his dim-bulb bumbling through Muslim culture that almost incites a race war. For all the genre spoofing and broad humor, it's a pointed satire of blindered imperialism and unthinking political insolence that reverberates through contemporary adventures that aren't nearly as funny.

Posted by dwhudson at June 13, 2006 1:41 AM