“Summer Noir,” the Sag Harbor Cinema’s summerlong series featuring classic noir and neo-noir, will launch on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. with Robert Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955). Bob Rubin, a film essayist and collector, will take questions after the screening. Also at the cinema as of Saturday is a new third-floor exhibition, “Trapped in the Shadows: The Worlds of Film Noir.” The show of artwork, rare posters, photographs, scripts, and books has been curated by Rubin from his own collection.
The series, which will run through September, reflects quintessential noir themes, among them moral ambiguities, corrupt systems, cultural anxieties, existential crises, and doomed love, as well as its stylistic trademarks. Those qualities are shared by canonical works from the 1940s and ’50s as well as more recent interpretations.
Among the former are Edgar G. Ulmer’s “Detour” (1945), Howard Hawks’s “The Big Sleep” (1946), Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” (1944), Tay Garnett’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946), Jacques Tourneurs’s “Out of the Past” (1947), Nicholas Ray’s “They Live by Night” (1948), and Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil” (1958). The cinema will celebrate Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday on June 1 with Henry Hathaway’s “Niagara” (1953), in which she plays a honeymooner plotting to kill her husband.
The second noir wave features Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” (1973), an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel, starring Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe. Other more recent titles are Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974), which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and garnered Robert Towne the best screenplay Oscar; Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Fargo” (1996), which earned Frances McDormand the first of her three best actress Academy Awards; Clint Eastwood’s psychological thriller “Play Misty for Me” (1971); Curtis Hanson’s “L.A. Confidential” (1997), the winner of best screenplay and best supporting actress awards, the latter for Kim Basinger; David Fincher’s “Gone Girl” (2014), adapted from the Gillian Flynn novel, and Steve McQueen’s heist film “Widows” (2018).
The series opener, “Kiss Me Deadly,” stars Ralph Meeker as the private detective Mike Hammer and Cloris Leachman as Christina, whom Hammer picks up while she is standing by a highway wearing only a trenchcoat. What begins as a routine pickup quickly devolves into something more sinister, as strangers knock out Hammer and murder Christina. The private eye and Velda, his assistant, become ensnared in a nightmare of Cold War paranoia and deception.
The film has been cited as a stylistic precursor to the French New Wave and credited with influencing a number of filmmakers, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Quentin Tarantino. In 1999, it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry.
A new 4K restoration of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (1986) will be shown on Friday, May 29. When Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home from college, he finds a severed ear in an abandoned field. He teams up with a detective’s daughter (Laura Dern) to solve the mystery, which might involve an attractive lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini), and eventually a sexually depraved psychopath (Dennis Hopper).
Joseph Gelmis wrote in his Newsday review, “ ‘Blue Velvet’ is bruising, but it’s fascinating — a bizarre thriller, deliriously erotic, perversely funny, appallingly cruel,” while Sean French of Sight and Sound said, “The final brilliant twist of this extraordinary film is to show us, not just the strangeness of what surrounds normal life, but the strangeness of normal life itself.”
Among the special guests who will appear at selected screenings are Robert Polito, a writer, who will join Rubin for a discussion of “Detour” on June 14; Carter Burwell, the composer who has scored most of the Coen brothers’ films, starting with their first, “Blood Simple”; Sean Price Williams, a director of photography, and Walter Hill, the director of “Johnny Handsome” (1980), a crime thriller that is in the series and stars Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Forest Whitaker, and Morgan Freeman.
“The interplay between light and darkness is at the essence of noir,” said Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, the cinema’s founding artistic director. “As such, its shades deepen or soften according to the historical moment, a filmmaker’s vision, the eye of a cinematographer, a star’s features, or the lamp of a projector. Its instability is part of the attraction, just like the sense of peril that infuses its stories. Too moody to be properly characterized as a film genre, noir has touched them all.”
‘The Great Gatsby’
Next Thursday at 6 p.m., in a prelude to Canio’s marathon reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, the cinema will show in 35-millimeter Elliott Nugent’s rarely seen 1949 adaptation of the novel. It was first adapted in 1926 for a now-lost silent film; Paramount embarked on a second adaptation starring Alan Ladd in the title role, along with Betty Field as Daisy Buchanan, Macdonald Carey as Nick Carraway, Ruth Hussey as Jordan Baker, and Barry Sullivan as Tom Buchanan.
The marathon reading will happen on May 30 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the John Jermain Memorial Library and continue from 2:30 to 6 at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum. An after-party will follow with a silent auction, period music, and festivities. The event is a fund-raiser for Canio’s Cultural Cafe, an educational nonprofit.
