Noir Fest Showcases Tough Guys, Feisty Gals

The American Cinematheque presents at the Egyptian “Side Streets and Back Alleys: The Second Annual Festival of Film Noir,” which last year proved one of the group’s most popular offerings ever, a success that appears likely to be repeated.

As before, many of the films will screen with appearances by stars and directors. These tight, sardonic thrillers of the ‘40s and ‘50s have held up much better than many of the more ballyhooed, bigger-budgeted films of the same era.

The series starts Friday at 7 p.m. with an in-person tribute to Jack Palance, who will discuss “I Died a Thousand Times” (1955), in which he plays a paroled con contemplating one of those fatal one-last-heists. Lori Nelson and Earl Holliman co-star. It will be followed at 9:45 with a pair of noirs from Monogram Pictures, “When Strangers Marry” (1944), a taut psychological melodrama with Kim Hunter and Robert Mitchum far removed from director William Castle’s famously gimmicky horror pictures of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and “Decoy” (1946), which the cinematheque promises is “cheap, tawdry and unforgettable.”

Phil Karlson was one of the most compelling directors to work in film noir, and one of his most famous pictures screens Sunday at 7:30 p.m. “The Phenix City Story” (1955) is set in the actual Alabama sin city, serving a nearby military base, and stars Richard Kiley as a young lawyer who returns to his hometown determined to clean it up.

It will be followed by the less well-known but equally impressive “Tight Spot” (1955), a fine example of why the films in this series are always worth a look. Nearing the end of her tenure as a top movie star, Ginger Rogers is terrific as a feisty, down-to-earth gal who became acquainted with a gangster (Lorne Greene) only to end up in prison unjustly convicted of harboring the fugitive Greene.

Will crusading prosecuting attorney Edward G. Robinson and surly cop Brian Keith not only keep Ginger alive, but also persuade her to testify against him so that he might be deported to his native country, a la Lucky Luciano? The film is set primarily in a hotel suite, but this doesn’t keep Karlson from building acute suspense or from making his film anything less than intensely cinematic. Rogers and Robinson deliver like the veterans they were, but the revelation here is Keith.

Long before he became known as a gruff type, he shows himself to be capable of playing a complex, conflicted man, at once sensitive and surprisingly sensual. Although younger than Rogers, the two are well-matched, and the chemistry between them quite palpable. “Tight Spot” is a terse, edgy gem typical of Karlson.

The Karlson double feature will be preceded at 5 p.m. with an in-person tribute to Ricardo Montalban, who will be seen in John Sturges’ “Mystery Street” (1950), which gave Montalban the chance to break away from his Latin Lover roles in MGM musicals. Saturday will bring in-person tributes to actors Turhan Bey (“The Spiritualist,” at 5:30 p.m.) and Audrey Totter, who will appear between the 8 p.m. screening of Robert Montgomery’s “The Lady in the Lake” (1947), in which she starred with Montgomery, and Montgomery’s “Ride the Pink Horse” (1947), in which he starred with Wanda Hendrix.

On Wednesday at 8 p.m. the cinematheque will present Ted Bonnitt’s delightful documentary “Mau Mau Sex Sex” on sexploitation pioneers 84-year-old Dan Sonney and 76-year-old David Friedman, who for 28 years had their own mini-studio on Cordova Street, off old Film Row on Vermont Avenue near Washington Boulevard, once the home of film exchanges and theater equipment suppliers.

Sonney was the son of an Italian immigrant coal-miner-turned-lawman-turned-showman once he nabbed a famous criminal. The rehabilitated criminal toured with the elder Sonney, who then cast the famous criminal in a film in which the ex-con played himself.

Friedman, who was rising through the ranks of Paramount’s PR department when he decided to team up with Sonney, credits his partner’s father with inventing the exploitation film. The cheapies were made outside the constraints of the mainstream industry and dealt with such lurid topics as prostitution, venereal disease, drugs and child brides.

The pictures tended to promise more than they delivered but were trashy fun anyway. (The documentary’s title comes from a serious documentary on the Mau Maus, narrated by Chet Huntley, no less, that Sonney bought and, with crude additional scenes, turned into a sexploitation release.)

Sonney and Friedman were eventually to become major producers of sexploitation pictures of the ‘60s and ‘70s, having started with nudist movies, then moved on to “roughies” with their sadomasochistic aura, and increasingly sexier items. But the films were rendered obsolete by the advent of hard-core pictures and the video revolution, although the partners’ titles are being resurrected on cassettes. Feminists have viewed such films as degrading to women, but Sonney and Friedman refuse to take themselves or their vast output seriously. They are hearty, good-humored men without apologies; Sonney has been married 61 years and has four daughters; Friedman has been married 47 years to Carol, a woman with an astringent wit and an independent cast of mind. In the years she and Friedman lived in Los Angeles, she created her own sense of identity and was a devoted supporter of the Los Angeles Zoo. Some years ago the Friedmans returned to their native South, and Friedman got into the carnival business that attracted him in his teens.

Bonnitt’s film is affectionate, with amusing asides, but a bit hazy on chronology and geography. You don’t have to know about Sonney and Friedman to enjoy “Mau Mau Sex Sex,” but it helps.

The Lloyd E. Rigler Theater is at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood.

Information: (323) 466-FILM.

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The Israel Film Festival continues at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, through April 13, and while few of the films have strong crossover potential, many are of considerable merit and most are screened several times. Two notable dramatic features are “Vulcan Junction,” which premieres tonight at 7:30, and “White Lies,” which first screens Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

Eran Riklis’ “Vulcan Junction” is a lively, entertaining melodrama with music that unfolds over the nine days leading up to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. It takes its title from an industrial area near Haifa--and from a club of the same name, run by a 40-year-old rocker from New Jersey.

It’s the showcase and hangout for Genetic Code, a struggling rock band with a singer, Micha Shelly (Oren Shabo), who’s just been given a shot at the big time--without the band. This is but one of the dilemmas facing the group’s five members as war draws near. What unfolds is punchy, sure-fire soap opera stuff put over by a dynamic cast and enlivened mightily by popular American and Israeli music of the time. Charismatic Shabo has a powerful presence and a plaintive singing style; wisely, the film is punctuated with his performances.

Itzhak Rubin’s “White Lies” explores the lingering effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their children. That an elderly woman (Orna Porat), widowed for some time, has never spoken of her experiences in Auschwitz has unconsciously fostered an evasiveness in her relations with her son (Sharon Alexander) and daughter (Smadar Kalchinsky). After a long sojourn in Paris, where he failed both as a playwright and as a lover, Alexander has returned to retrench, only to learn that his loving mother is terminally ill.

Just as she refuses to acknowledge his failures, he becomes determined to protect her from the truth of her condition. His sister, who lives in the U.S., can’t handle the situation at all, even when she reluctantly returns for a visit. And for myriad reasons, her mother in turn can’t handle her daughter’s presence either. Alexander and Porat are pillars of the acting profession in Israel, and they are most impressive as a mother and son struggling to come to terms with the truths of their lives. However, Rubin, in his feature debut, has a substantial distance to go in learning how to bring shape and pace to such somber material to make it yield maximum impact.

Information: (877) 966-4166 or (323) 966-4166.

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“Desperation Blvd.,” which screens midnights Friday and Saturday at the Sunset 5, lives up to its title only too well. Comedian Judy Tenuta conceived this film as a vehicle for herself, playing a 40-year-old former child star of a long-ago TV series now desperately trying to establish herself as an adult actor. Directed by Greg Clienna, the film wisely takes a satirical tone, but it’s soon dissipated as Tenuta can’t resist pulling out all the stops, undermining the film’s probability. Luckily, Michael Lerner is on hand as her amusingly bottom-of-the-barrel manager who augments his client list with porn actors. Even so, Tenuta and her film grow swiftly tiresome: showoff becomes turnoff. Tenuta is scheduled to appear in person with her film.

The Sunset 5 is at 8000 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood.

Information: (323) 848-3500.

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The Laemmle Theaters’ “Documentary Days 2000” series continues with Dan Geller and Dayna Golfdine’s “Now and Then: From Frosh to Seniors,” which screens Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5 and April 8 and 9 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex. It will also screen at the Sunset 5 Friday and Monday through Thursday at 10 a.m. in an Oscar-qualifying run. The documentary is a follow-up to “Frosh,” a captivating look at a group of Stanford freshman, now revisited in their senior year.

Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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Outfest Retrospective: John Greyson series continues Friday at the Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place, with the 7 p.m. screening of his 1997 “Uncut.”

Screening Saturday at 7 p.m. at Raleigh Studios is Greyson’s 1991 “Urinal,” a venturesome and controversial take on public sex and police entrapment.

Information: (323) 960-2394.