Noir, Vintage, and Neo

Friday, January 26 marks the beginning of Noir City 5, the annual film festival in San Francisco led by noir titan (and Chronicle crime fiction columnist) Eddie Muller. One of this festival’s joys is that it doesn’t just trot out the usual suspects (the closest it gets to the noir canon in this year’s schedule is The Big Combo and Scarlet Street). Instead, audiences are gifted with rarities such as Abandoned, which chronicles a baby-adoption racket and stars Dennis O’Keefe and, deliciously, Gale Storm of television’s My Little Margie (as well as Mike Mazurki, so memorable as Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet), along with Hell’s Half Acre, billed as “tiki noir,” featuring Evelyn Keyes as a taxi dancer and with a script by Steve Fisher (author of the great noir novel, I Wake Up Screaming). For my part, I won’t miss the Charles McGraw double feature scheduled for January 29.

While many (though not all) of these less-lauded noir gems lack the visual lushness of classics such as Out of the Past or The Killers, they bring countless other pleasures, including rich variations on noir themes of desolation and betrayal. Those themes have been fresh in my mind, having just watched the first two seasons of the television series Wiseguy (1987–1990), which may lack the visual panache of, say, Michael Mann’s TV work of the period but offers just about everything else. In fact, in light of Thursday’s post about top shows of the 1980s, I’d argue for Wiseguy as possibly being that decade’s best show. While contemporary viewings suffer a bit from moments of distracting “Eighties-ness,” not the least of which is the size of Annette Bening’s hair in her guest role, Wiseguy held up better for me than my beloved Crime Story (1986–1988). Loaded up with talent and a clever early ’60s-meets-’80s aesthetic, Crime Story started far more promisingly (the first few episodes, including two directed by Abel Ferrara, are dazzling) but, for me, disintegrated quickly under the weight of its own strenuous style. (Of course, Wiseguy too fell quickly.)

With The Sopranos and The Wire, among others before them, we have become very used to long story arcs that allow for both plot and emotional complications, and Wiseguy offers just those strengths, boasting a moral complexity that deepens with each episode of its first gangbuster season and into its second (with the famously creepy brother-sister combo of Kevin Spacey and Joan Severance). For every dated moment (the music, the freeze-frame explosions), there are a 100 more that endure, especially those provided by the knotty relationship between Ken Wahl (as undercover federal agent Vinnie Terranova) and charismatic Atlantic City crime boss Sonny Steelgrave (Ray Sharkey, in a truly bravura performance).

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Finally, I want to thank J. Kingston Pierce and all the Rap Sheet contributors for sharing their wonderful space with me this past week. I’ve loved every minute of it, and I am thrilled that I’ll be staying on as an occasional contributor. After a few weeks of running around the country, jabbering about my new book, I’ll return to post periodically in this space. See you back soon.