The Noir City: Chicago film festival—which starts tonight, Friday, August 19, and continues through Thursday, August 25, at the Music Box—will feature new 35-millimeter prints of several rare and little-seen noir titles, including the Frank Sinatra musical Meet Danny Wilson (1952), the Tony Curtis boxing drama Flesh and Fury (1952), and Humphrey Bogart’s final film, The Harder They Fall (1956).
As a writer and film historian, Rode has authored two books: Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy, published in 2008, and Sit on the Camera and Fight Like a Tiger: The Life and Times of Michael Curtiz, which is set for publication in 2017.
We’ve also just put out a couple of films that we restored, Woman on the Run and Too Late for Tears. We’ve partnered with a DVD firm known as Flicker Alley in LA and we’ve put both of those movies out on Blu-Ray, and Eddie and I produce all of the extras on them.
One of the neat things about this whole festival circuit is all of the relationships that one develops with different people over the years and the connections that are made. It’s good for the movies and it’s good for people.
To answer the first part of your question, absolutely. I grew up with the Golden Age Hollywood DNA, because I sat around the dinner table listening to all of these stories. My mother was born in Hollywood Hospital in 1922, and all I heard were stories about movies. Or if there was a movie on TV, she would say, “Look, there’s so-and-so. Remember, he used to come over for cards?” And there’d be some guy, gliding through a scene in a movie as a waiter . . . my mother’s first husband was Yul Brenner’s cousin; she knew Yul. So there’s no doubt that growing up in that environment, even though I grew up in New Jersey, planted the film DNA.
In Chicago we put together a festival of all 35-millimeter movies at a venerable theatre. But the fact is it’s going to be very difficult as time goes on to assemble a program like this. It’s very unique, and it was very difficult to put together. Some of the films that we wanted to screen, that the Music Box wanted to screen, that Eddie Muller and I wanted to program, that we’ve even shown even recently, [studios] said, “Nope, we only have one print and we’re not renting it out.” So that’s the world we live in. We’re doing the best we can to continue preserving and restoring these films, and the support we get from the public has been very important and it’s great. But with a lot of these films, if they’re not out on DVD in the future, it’s going to be very difficult to screen some of them. That’s just the reality of it.
Right. It seems like film will keep getting more expensive, but in keeping it alive more people—young people, aspiring filmmakers— will have the chance to experience this art form and be inspired by it. As Martin Scorsese once said, “Why would anyone dream of telling young artists to throw away their paints and canvasses because iPads are so much easier to carry?”
