So the Roxie is in the middle of a two week Noir Festival. I can't make it up to much of it, but I did catch one day, two movies:
THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (1948): The movie opens with Jean Courtland (Gail Russell) about to throw her self off a walkway onto a train. Luckily her fiancée Elliot Carson (John Lund) gets to her just in time. She says something about the stars haunting her, and he takes her to a diner where they mead John Triton (Edward G. Robinson), someone they clearly know. He spins a fantastical tale about how he used to be a carnival psychic. A complete fraud, until he started having real visions. And that, in a reasonably circuitous route, leads us to this moment, with Triton predicting Jean will die by the end of the week, under a starry sky. Ominous...or maybe he's a con artist. An odd bit of supernatural(?) noir, with a cool performance by William Demarest as the sarcastic, skeptical detective Lt. Shawn.
THE SPIRITUALIST (aka THE AMAZING MR. X) (1948): We stick with the psychic theme and a woman in trouble. This time Christine Faber (Lynn Bari) thinks she hears he dead husband Paul (Donald Curtis) calling to her. On the beach she meets the mysterious and suave psychic Alexis (Turhan Bey). And he might just be able to help her...or scam her and her entire family out of a vast fortune.
Both films were pretty silly, with THE SPIRITUALIST being more so (or more intentionally so). But it was still a pretty good night.
Total Running Time: 160 minutes
My Total Minutes: 236,065
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