Film Noir Foundation News

In January 2008 The Film Noir Foundation celebrated its greatest accomplishment to date: completing restoration of The Prowler, the classic 1951 film noir written by Dalton Trumbo and directed by Joseph Losey. The film had its grand "re-premiere" at the Noir City 6 festival in San Francisco, introduced by James Ellroy, a member of the FNF Advisory Council who played a part in funding the restoration. Also in attendance was Christopher Trumbo, son of the author. The film was included in UCLA's Festival of Preservation later that year, and has been screened Noir City satellite festivals in Hollywood, Seattle, Washington DC, and Chicago. It will also screen at the Lyon Film Festival in France in October, 2009. [Attending the Noir City 6 "re-premiere" of The Prowler (l-r): Todd Wiener, archivist, UCLA Film and Television Archive; James Ellroy; Nancy Mysel, who managed the restoration for UCLA, and Eddie Muller.]

The FNF is currently funding the restoration of unjustly rare Cry Danger (1951), starring Dick Powell. In charge of the projects will be UCLA film preservationist Nancy Mysel, who last year managed the FNF-funded restoration of the 1951 classic The Prowler. Although Cry Danger’s plot is fairly routine—a framed ex-con (Powell) seeks revenge on the crooks who set him up—William Bowers’ witty, well-honed script, Joseph Biroc’s atmospheric location shooting, and the sharply realized performances of the entire cast make Cry Danger a film deserving of more recognition than it has received. The full story of this exceptional film's history, and the tangled tale of why it's not available on DVD, can be found in the May/June 2009 issue of the Noir City Sentinel.

In addition to its spectacularly successful annual Noir City festival each January in San Francisco, the FNF has expanded its public shows into Los Angeles, where the American Cinematheque's annual April "Festival of Film Noir" is now officially a "Noir City" event. The FNF has also partnered with the Seattle Film Society to bring an annual Noir City festival to the recently restored McCaw Theatre in downtown Seattle each February. The state-of-the-art AFI Film Center in Silver Spring, Maryland has also been added as a Noir City venue, with a regular Oct-Nov slate of films.

The Second City became the latest Noir City on July 31 through August 6, 2009, as the Film Noir Foundation teamed up with Chicago’s Music Box Theatre for a week-long festival of film noir. "Chicago has always been high on our list of cities that need a regular noir festival," said FNF president Eddie Muller, "and it was equally obvious that the Music Box, one of the great remaining movie theaters in the nation, is where Noir City belongs." The highlight of the festival was the special appearance of Harry Belafonte, celebrating the 50th anniversary of his classic crime thriller, Odds Against Tomorrow.

Thanks to the efforts of FNF, several films long thought lost have returned to circulation in brand new 35-mm prints: Night Has a Thousand Eyes, a long-missing Cornell Woolrich classic from 1948; John Farrow's brilliant supernatural noir Alias Nick Beal; Robert Siodmak's early B rarity Fly-By-Night; Crane Wilbur's The Story of Molly X, starring June Havoc; the terrific Ida Lupino noir Woman In Hiding; I Walk Alone, a 1947 classic starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Lizabeth Scott; Abandoned, a 1949 exposé noir starring Dennis O'Keefe and Gale Storm, and (courtesy of Sony Corp.), a brand new 35mm print of Roy Huggins' 1948 detective yarn I Love Trouble. All of these films had virtually vanished for the past fifty years, but have now been rediscovered and are once again available for theatrical screening.

The first two rescue missions of the Film Noir Foundation were the creation of brand new 35mm prints of The Window and Nobody Lives Forever, struck from original negatives at the Warner Bros. film archive, a project funded by the Foundation. The films had their initial screenings at the Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco, in January, 2006 and have subsequently been screened at New York's Film Forum, the "Summer in the Dark" festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Seattle Art Museum's annual autumn film noir festival.

The Film Noir Foundation continues to work in cooperation with the studios and UCLA Film and Television Archive to bring other worthy films back into circulation.

Can you help the Film Noir Foundation track down 35mm prints or elements from this "Most Wanted" list of missing noir films? »READ MORE.