Phantom Lady is one of seventeen films in Robert Siodmak retrospective at Lincoln Center
ROBERT SIODMAK: DARK VISIONARY
Film at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
144 West Sixty-Fifth St. at Amsterdam Ave.
December 11-19, All-Access Pass $119
www.filmlinc.org
In his 2010 essay “Dark Mirrors” for the Museum of the Moving Image, David Cairns wrote, “If film noir had not somehow coalesced from a miasma of influences floating in the atmosphere of ’40s America — postwar disillusion and anxiety, French poetic realism, German Expressionism, the gangster movie, and pulp fiction traditions — perhaps only Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak could have invented it. Lang, because his work always carried a dark worldview, filtering sociopolitical tensions and focusing them into intense, ecstatic, tortured images. Siodmak, because his movies already followed two normally divergent paths — social realism and expressionist nightmare — which converge to make noir.”
While the Austrian-born German-American Lang is well known for such classics as Metropolis, M, You Only Live Once, Ministry of Fear, The Big Heat, and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, made in Germany and Hollywood, Siodmak, who was born in Dresden and worked in Germany, Paris, and California, is far less well known despite making some all-time favorites in multiple genres and being denounced by Josef Goebbels as “a corrupter of the German family.”
Film at Lincoln Center is honoring the director with the seventeen-film retrospective “Robert Siodmak: Dark Visionary,” including new 4K restorations of 1943’s Son of Dracula, 1944’s Phantom Lady, 1945’s The Suspect, and 1946’s The Killers. The works range from 1930’s People on Sunday, codirected by Edgar G. Ullmer, through 1952’s The Crimson Pirate, and feature such stars as Ava Gardner, Lon Chaney Jr., Maria Montez, Charles Laughton, Olivia de Havilland, George Sanders, Dorothy McGuire, Burt Lancaster, Barbara Stanwyck, Victor Mature, Yvonne De Carlo, Lloyd Bridges, and Ella Raines.
Burt Lancaster makes a killer film debut in classic 1946 noir from Robert Siodmak
THE KILLERS (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
Thursday, December 12, 6:30
Friday, December 13, 8:30
www.filmlinc.org
In 1950, Edmond O’Brien starred as auditor Frank Bigelow in Rudolph Maté’s classic noir D.O.A., a story told in flashback as Bigelow tries to figure out why someone has poisoned him. Four years earlier, O’Brien dealt with another kind of fatalism in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, playing insurance agent Jim Reardon, who is investigating why a gas station attendant was brutally gunned down in his bed in suburban Brentwood, New Jersey. The film opens with cold-hearted contract killers Al (Charles McGraw) and Max (William Conrad) arriving in town, looking for the Swede (Burt Lancaster), aka Pete Lund and Ole Andreson. They waltz into Henry’s Diner, giving orders and exchanging mean-spirited dialogue with no fears or worries. When Nick Adams (Phil Brown) warns the Swede that the men are coming to kill him, the former boxer knows there’s nothing he can do about it anymore; he’s tired of running, and he’s ready to meet his end. It’s a shocking way to begin a movie; up to that point, it’s a faithful version of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, but the rest is the splendid invention of writers Richard Brooks, Anthony Veiller, and John Huston and producer Mark Hellinger. Reardon soon finds himself meeting with a series of gangsters as they relate, through flashbacks, a plot to rob a payroll, perpetrated by a motley crew that includes “Dum Dum” Clarke (Jack Lambert), “Blinky” Franklin (Jeff Corey), the Swede, and mastermind Big Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker), along with Big Jim’s gun moll, femme fatale extraordinaire Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner). Reardon’s boss (Donald MacBride) wants him to forget about it, since it’s essentially about a meager $2,500 insurance claim, but Reardon is determined to find out what happened to a quarter million in cash, with the help of the Swede’s childhood friend, Lt. Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene).
Ava Gardner turns more than a few heads in The Killers
The Killers is an intense, passionate heist flick, structured like Citizen Kane, starting with a death and then putting everything together via interviews and flashbacks. Lancaster and Gardner are magnetic, he in his screen debut, she in the film that made her a star. Siodmak (The Dark Mirror, The Spiral Staircase) masterfully navigates the noir tropes, from Miklós Rózsa’s jazzy score, which jumps out from the opening credits, and Woody Bredell’s oft-angled black-and-white cinematography that maintains an ominous, shadowy sensibility throughout to deft characterizations and surprising plot twists. As it makes its way through the seven deadly sins, The Killers lives up to its fab billing as a “Raw! Rugged! Ruthless drama of a man who gambled — his luck — his love — his life for the treachery of a girl’s lips.” Nominated for four Oscars, for Best Director, Best Film Editing (Arthur Hilton), Best Music, and Best Adapted Screenplay, The Killers, which was also made into a 1958 student short by Andrei Tarkovsky and a 1964 crime drama by Don Siegel starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, Norman Fell, and Ronald Reagan, is screening December 12 and 13 in a new 4K restoration in the Film at Lincoln Center series “Robert Siodmak: Dark Visionary.” Be on the lookout for such other gems and surprises as Inquest, The Burning Secret, Cobra Woman, The Spiral Staircase, and Criss Cross.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]