Ten years ago was a very different time in my life. Today, I’m a married father of two suddenly ambulatory kids who love nothing more than pulling things off shelves. My nights are mostly spent reconstructing our shattered home, in preparation for the coming destruction that will arrive the next day. It’s surprisingly great, like raking a zen garden.
Ten years ago, I was recently divorced and had a ping-pong table in my living room. I worked nights at a local theater where a good friend was a long-time projectionist. He was divorced, too, though not so recently. Still, we were kindred spirits and after closing up for the night, we would often repair to his apartment, which housed an admirable collection of old films amassed over years of working in theaters and video stores. Drinks and cigarettes in hand — I smoked then, too — we sat down, night after night after night, to watch movies.
What we watched was all over the place: Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton, old Jack Lemmon pictures, the Mexican wrestler-as-superhero series of Santo films. But more than anything, we watched a lot of film noir. Probably it was a combination of the hour and the ashtrays and the whiskey, and probably being divorced helped, but noir always felt right. Yet for all the familiarity of the twists, turns and reversals, noir was also an endlessly varied genre that spanned national borders and decades of filmmaking trends to bring viewers stories whose true meaning often bubbled along beneath the guns-and-gams surface.
It’s that depth that is on display in Amherst Cinema’s ongoing series Hard-boiled: Film Noir Classics, running through the first week of December. Already the cinema has shown films like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, and this week they bring in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly for Sunday and Tuesday screenings.
Aldrich’s film is a bit unusual for a noir, in that it directly addresses the nuclear issues of the time. More frantic than many of its ilk, the film focuses on an effort to recover a box containing radioactive material. Ralph Meeker stars as private eye Mike Hammer, who happens upon a hitchhiking beauty (Cloris Leachman). Turns out, she isn’t as innocent as Hammer first supposes. When the pair are abducted and tortured by a couple of thugs, Hammer is forced to revisit his assumptions. See Aldrich’s film, and revisit your own assumptions about what film noir can be.
Also this week: Force Majeure, a smash with critics at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a sharply observed psychodrama about a Swedish family on vacation in the French Alps. All seems picture perfect, until, when they’re lunching at a mountainside restaurant, an avalanche begins to roll down the hill and husband Tomas makes an instinctive move that could cost him his marriage and family.
Finally this week, if you have tweens or teens in your house, you already know that the final installment of The Hunger Games trilogy is hitting area theaters this week. The young-adult dystopian book series has its final story — Mockingjay — broken up into two films; Part One opens this Friday, and sets up the story of young Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) becoming the leader of a nationwide rebellion against an oppressive government led by President Snow (Donald Sutherland).
Devotees may be interested in attending a special Thursday marathon at Cinemark Hadley, Eastfield 16, and West Springfield 15. Screening all three of the films in the series back to back, the eight-hour extravaganza will let kids and parents alike catch up on all the past Hunger Games doings, and get ready for the series’ final installment, due out in just about a year.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com .
