They’re young, they’re in love, and they kill people

The IFI presents a Killer Couples season for the month of June. Extremely notable by its absence is Bonnie & Clyde, which one would have thought essential. In its place there is a grab-bag of noirs, B-movies, black comedies, latter-day B-movies, and art-house drama, ranging from the 1940s to the 1990s, and Hollywood to New Zealand via the Nouvelle Vague.

Double Indemnity

Wednesday 6^th June 18:20

Neil Brand claims for Miklos Rozsa’s opening chords the origin of the classic uneasy dissonance of high film noir music. One might note that the writing credits are equally seminal: the knowing dialogue of Raymond Chandler, the cynical plotting of James M Cain, and the chilly irony of director Billy Wilder. Nice guy Fred MacMurray is cast wonderfully against type as an insurance salesman who begins an affair with the wife of a client, Barbara Stanwyck’s definitive femme fatale.

Compulsion

Sunday 10^th June 15:45

Orson Welles cameos as a thinly disguised Clarence Darrow pleading, at some length, for mercy for the upstanding rich young psychopaths he’s defending (Braford Dillman and Dean Stockwell). Based on the same infamous Leopold & Loeb murder case of 1924 that inspired Hitchcock’s Rope, director Richard Fleischer, in less fantastical territory than usual for him, chillingly depicts the students outwitting their elders with Nietzschean aphorisms before their abrogation of morality comes a cropper over a (providentially?) misplaced pair of glasses.

The Getaway

Wednesday 13^th June 18:20

Cool character Steve McQueen is a hardened criminal in hard-man director Sam Peckinpah’s tough-minded version of hard-boiled novelist Jim Thompson’s brutal pulp novel, adapted by the thinking man’s hard man auteur Walter Hill. Yeah, there was a lot of competing machismo on the development and production of this 1972 movie. Poor Love Story star Ali McGraw got dog’s abuse for her poor acting from a perpetually drunk Peckinpah even as smitten co-star McQueen began a scandalous affair with her.

 

Ascenseur pour l’echafaud

Sunday 17^th June 15:30

Louis Malle somehow convinced jazz great Miles Davis to simply improvise a score while watching footage of his 1957 directorial debut. Not technically a Nouvelle Vague film but it seems churlish to deny Malle’s kinship with them on account of two years’ chronology. Jeanne Moreau enigmatically wanders the streets of Paris at night waiting for her lover (Maurice Ronet), after their perfect murder of her husband goes predictably sideways, while a sub-plot sees two younger lovers cause chaos.

 

Pretty Poison

Wednesday 20^th June 18:30

Psycho star Anthony Perkins is released from a mental institution under strict conditions but immediately runs into the murderous arms of manipulative teenager Tuesday Weld in this bizarre black comedy. A haze of insane conspiracies, mayhem, and bloodshed ensue, with an RD Laing zeitgeist-surfing vibe that the sane people are the ones in the asylum – the truly crazy people are the ones running around outside in the dramatically disintegrating America of 1968. Who wouldn’t prefer being safely locked up?

 

The Honeymoon Killers

Saturday 23^rd June 15:30

French Connection and Jesus of Nazareth actor Tony Lo Bianco stars in Leonard Kastle’s blackly comic thriller as a con man who offers love and marriage to lonely women via lonely hearts newspaper classifieds but has something very different in mind, aided and abetted by his partner Shirley Stoler. A few scenes directed by Martin Scorsese still remain in the picture; astonishingly the exuberant motor-mouth was fired after 4 days because he was working too … slowly. Yep.

 

Natural Born Killers

Sunday 24^th June 15:30

I think the IFI rather enjoys showing Oliver Stone’s 1994 throw-every-film-format-and-editing-style-there-is-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks media satire/fiasco just to remind everyone how they were prevented from doing so by the boo-hiss censor back in 1994. Now showing in 35mm, this may be your last chance to enjoy this as an original piece of madness before Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind is finally released (soon, allegedly) and we can see the footage that Stone was shown privately pre-JFK and NBK…

Gun Crazy

Thursday 28^th June 18:30

Rope star John Dall is a naive young man who meets and marries (unhinged) carnival sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr (Irish actress Peggy Cummins) only to fall into a world of trouble due to her criminal proclivities. Dalton Trumbo co-wrote this while blacklisted, and there is some showy single-take and fixed-position direction by Joseph Lewis. Recent contributor hereabouts Friedrich Bagel somehow fell asleep during a screen 2 showing of this B-movie classic in the IFI some years ago, for shame!

Heavenly Creatures

Saturday 30^th June 18:20

Before the unexpected transition to epic fantasy with The Lord of the Rings and after Meet the Freebles was Peter Jackson’s equally unexpected gothic drama based on a real life cause celebre in 1950s New Zealand. Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey both made their impressive screen debuts as the teenagers whose obsessive bond and shared fantasy world led to a very savage murder in the here and now. Legendary Weta was formed by Jackson to create that fantasy world.

Film Noir @ the Lighthouse

The Lighthouse presents your favourite monochrome cops, gangsters and femmes fatale in a season of classic film noirs showcasing deadly dames Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, Joan Crawford, and Gene Tierney; smouldering 20 foot tall on the silver screen!

The Big Heat

Sunday 26th
“A hard cop and soft dame”
Fritz Lang made a number of hard-boiled movies in the 1950s, including the diabolical Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, but this is the pick of the bunch; a vicious and unrelenting film noir stars Glenn Ford as a cop on the trail of a violent gang led by the terrifying Lee Marvin. The luminous Gloria Grahame plays the ultimate tragic gangster’s moll who learns the hard way about betraying Lee Marvin’s trust. Beautifully shot and full of surprises, and featuring a notorious use of hot coffee, this dark, sexy noir is a perfect example of the genre.

 

The Big Sleep

Wednesday 29^th & Sunday 2nd
“The type of man she hated . . . was the type she wanted!”
Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and a lot of sassy dialogue from the pen of Raymond Chandler under the direction of Howard Hawks – what more could you want in a classic noir? Private detective Philip Marlowe, the original shop-soiled Galahad, is hired by a rich family to investigate a case of blackmail. Before the complex case is over, he’s seen murder, blackmail, and what might be love; but not who killed the chauffeur, one of cinema’s enduring mysteries… Don’t miss Bogey and Bacall smouldering on the big screen in glorious 35mm!

 

Mildred Pierce

Wednesday 12^th September & Sunday 16^th September
“Please don’t tell anyone what Mildred Pierce did!”
You’ve seen Todd Haynes’ recent leisurely HBO adaptation with the extremely weird original ending so now remind yourself of how the 1940s writers got around novelist James M Cain’s un-filmable pay-off in this sophisticated film noir which forgoes gangsters and dirty cops in favour of a complex look at the relationship between a mother (Joan Crawford) and her spoiled daughter Veda. There is also, of course, a dead man in the kitchen and a smoking gun. Crawford won a well-deserved Oscar for her role as the intelligent, determined woman with one weakness…her daughter.

 

Laura

“A police detective falls in love with the woman whose murder he’s
investigating.”
Celebrated Austrian director Otto Preminger anticipated certain elements of Vertigo with this superbly crafted film noir about three men in love with the same woman…a dead woman. But who could blame them for their nascent necrophilia when the woman in question is the stunning Gene Tierney? Co-starring Clifton Webb and Vincent Price as her lovers, and future Fritz Lang regular Dana Andrews as the investigating detective, these three men trying to solve the mystery of who put a bullet in the beautiful face of Laura.

Tickets for individual films in the season are €9.00 but a season pass for all five films will set you back a mere €30. The season pass, however, can only be booked by calling into the cinema or phoning 01-8728006.