Black-and-white crime to be screened at Film Noir festival

• Author: HANNAH BROWN
• Published date: 11 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Noir movies provide the best escapism and excitement that cinema can offer, along with a dose of cynicism and darkness that makes them compelling, and they come with an underdog hero with whom we can always identify, whether he is on the right or wrong side of the law. And then there is that cinematography, filled with shadows and smoke, and featuring some of the most beautiful and intricate images ever put on film. Some of the greatest directors of the 20th century – among them John Huston, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick – are represented in this festival.

This Film Noir Festival is opening with one of the best-known noir films of all time: The Maltese Falcon. It was directed by John Huston, who never met a genre he did not master, in his directorial debut, and he adapted the screenplay from the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Humphrey Bogart has one of his greatest roles as Sam Spade, a detective who ends up searching for the title statue. It also features two of the best movie villains, played by Peter Lorre (who has said that this was his favorite of all his movies) and Sidney Greenstreet. Mary Astor plays the seemingly classy dame who has a lot to hide. The dialogue crackles and the plot gets very complicated, as it tends to do in noir.

If you can see just one movie in this festival, my pick would be Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. This 1944 film is one of the Austrian Jewish director's masterpieces. Raymond Chandler worked with Wilder on the script, which is adapted from a James Cain novel, and even though the two screenwriters reportedly did not get along, Double Indemnity features a brilliant, sophisticated screenplay that is witty and tragic. It tells the story of a handsome, arrogant insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray) who is seduced by the sexy wife (Barbara Stanwyck) of one of his clients to take part in a scheme involving fraud and murder. But the salesman's colleague, a quick-witted actuary (played by Edward G. Robinson, who was born Emanuel Goldenberg, into a Yiddish-speaking Romanian family), works to unravel the fraud. It has been parodied, imitated and referenced so many times, but the original has not lost its luster.

Robert Siodmak, another Jewish refugee from the Nazis, directed The Killers, a 1946 movie adapted from Ernest Hemingway's short story of the same title. The tense opening scene is taken straight from the story, as two insolent killers go to a small-town diner looking for the prey and intimidate the...