Noir City: Chicago 2

Genre? Mood? State of mind? Few people entirely agree on the definition of film noir, but one of the advantages of the term’s slipperiness is that the canon can always expand. This year’s edition of the Music Box’s Noir City series includes some titles that even the most conservative noirologists wouldn’t contest (He Ran All the Way, showing August 15 and 17) and at least one (Joseph H. Lewis’s Freudian pistol opera Gun Crazy, August 14 and 16) that any cinephile should consider essential.

But in some ways, the outliers are the most interesting works. Noir as pure atmosphere, Edmund Goulding’s unforgettable Nightmare Alley (August 14 and 17) tells the story of a carnival worker (Tyrone Power) whose blind ambition leads him to devise an escalating con as a mentalist in Chicago. The carnival setting is memorably sordid (the geek!), but the movie also has an overpowering sense of class and fatalism, and its ending is almost shockingly blunt.

If there’s a bona-fide discovery here, it’s John Auer’s City That Never Sleeps (August 13), the only film in the series extensively shot and set in this city. The movie has moments of Ed Wood–caliber clunkiness—it’s narrated in a godlike echo by Chicago itself (“I am the city. Hub and heart of America”)—but it’s also dense and absorbing, and its spiraling violence can all be traced back to the inner torment of a bad cop, who’s about to leave his job and wife. By the time it puts a Wabash Avenue “robotic man” under the gun, the film (which concludes with a superb El chase) has laid out an uncommonly rich and eccentric vision of an urban underworld—it’s sort of Night and the City crossed with It’s a Wonderful Life.

The lineup includes variations on familiar noir formulas, like Robert Parrish’s compelling Cry Danger (August 13), starring Dick Powell as a fall guy who, released early from prison, sets out to find the stash of $100,000 he was wrongfully convicted of stealing. Drive a Crooked Road (August 15 and 16), written by a pre–Pink Panther Blake Edwards, finds a sap mechanic cajoled into driving a getaway car. This routine material is made exponentially weirder by the casting of man-child Mickey Rooney, his trademark mildness constantly threatening to explode into violence.

David Miller’s Sudden Fear (August 18) is closer to Hitchcockian thriller than noir: The plot is too precise, the line between right and wrong too clearly drawn. Joan Crawford stars as a playwright and heiress seduced by the actor (Jack Palance) she had fired. If the payoff doesn’t quite prove worthy of the setup, Miller’s baroque lighting is intriguing, and the couple’s flirtation on a cross-country train is tense enough to keep the goodwill lingering.

The series includes two films by German-born Hollywood director Robert Siodmak, both showing on August 19. Pass on the sluggish gangland melodrama Cry of the City and check out the imperfect but far stranger Fly-by-Night, a 1942 wrong-man thriller that somehow turns into a madcap comedy before reaching an atomic climax that anticipates Kiss Me Deadly. Atomic climax? In 1942? If noir was one thing, it was consistently ahead of its time.

Noir City: Chicago 2 runs Friday 13 through August 19 at the Music Box.

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