SAN FRANCISCO: The 6th Annual Noir City Film Festival at the Castro is jam-packed with seamy rarities and not-available-on-DVD obscurities. It opens on January 25 with a tribute to actress Joan Leslie, who'll be interviewed onstage between screenings of the 1947 Repeat Performance and the striking 1943 backstage drama The Hard Way. There are also tributes to Dalton Trumbo — the Trumbo-scripted Joseph Losey film The Prowler will be introduced by modern noir master James Ellroy, and they'll even show the movie if ever stops talking — actress Gail Russell, and the granite-jawed Charles McGraw, who appears in Anthony Mann's Border Incident and Reign of Terror (sometimes known as The Black Book, and starring Richard Basehart as that least likely of noir villains, Maximilien Robespierre. ("Don't call me Max!")
LOS ANGELES: Your obedient Jew, Mel Brooks, will be on hand fora festival of his films at the American Cinematheque from January 23 through the 30th. Brooks will kick things off by introducing his little-seen sophomore effort, the 1970 The Twelve Chairs, based on an Ilf and Petrov novel and starring the young Frank Langella, Dom DeLuise, and the criminally underutilized British actor Ron Moody. On Saturday, he'll participate in a discussion between films during a double fill of his first big hit, the 1974 Blazing Saddles, and perhaps his most underappreciated comedy, the 1981 centuries-spanning vaudeville show The History of the World — Part 1. Given Brooks's legendary reputation as one of the funniest talkers of the age, this event might be of interest even to comedy aficionados who already have the movies themselves well memorized.
NEW YORK: The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking" (January 25 – February 14) is a big, ambitious program that concentrates on the output of Mosfilm, "the largest and most productive film studio during the Soviet era, which remains Russia’s most important film institution even today." Included are such chestnuts as Potemkin and the post-Stalin The Cranes Are Flying, as well as Tarkovsky's Mirror and other, lesser-known films such as Karen Shakhnazarov's1983 Jazzman, about a musician whose tastes run counter to those officially sanctioned by Moscow, and the more recent Happiness and Cargo 200.
