“Kiss of Death” & “The Sleeping City”
Noir City 22
Grand Lake Theatre, Oakland
January 25, 2025
No matter what some say about Oakland, it really isn’t very noir, particularly not on a sun-kissed Saturday afternoon in the gemütlich neighborhood of the Grand Lake Theatre, the location of the annual Noir Film Festival (dubbed Noir City). My wife and I entered the 1929-vintage Art Deco movie palace last weekend with a shared panini steak sandwich from the Modigliani Café next door, and found seats near the rear of a packed audience for the double-feature matinee on the Festival’s second of twelve days showcasing films from the ‘40s and early ‘50s.
Full disclosure: even though the Noir genre of this era only barely predated my elementary school education, I didn’t watch many of these films then or later in life. So I didn’t enter expecting something anywhere near as delicious as my panini.
But I do bear a fondness for celebrations of period, like the many vintage fedoras and occasional silk stockings I saw on by audiences members at the Grand Lake, and the brassy sounds of “Tea for Two” and “Honeysuckle Rose” piped into the spacious theater from the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ situated at the front. Following the organist’s applauded exit and the dimming of the house lights, the assembled fans of Noir were treated to a brilliant intro to Noir City 22. (The Festival had been launched in 2003 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, where it remained until the Castro was shuttered in 2023.)
The intro was assembled as a filmed collage of this year’s features, with dramatic soundtrack music and rib-tickling lines such as, “I don’t go to church — kneeling is bad for my nylons.” It also augured this year’s overall theme of Winsome Women Turned Wicked, and Festival founder Eddie Muller, taking the stage with Alicia Malone, his co-host on a Turner Classic Movies segment, shared his intention to correct the biased association of Noir with fedora-bearing male heros and anti-heros.
The featured actress in both of last Saturday’s matinee films — Kiss of Death (20th Century Fox, 1947) and The Sleeping City (1950, Universal Pictures) — was Coleen Gray, arguably the prettiest of the femmes fatales featured in this year’s poster (she’s at the lower right-hand corner). In Kiss of Death, Gray’s first billed role at age 25, she seems too pretty to be a femme fatale, and she really isn’t one. Instead, she’s Nettie, a former babysitter for leading man Victor Mature, whose heavy-lidded sensual visage is itself kind of pretty. He plays Nick Bianco, an ex-con who bungles a jewelry store robbery and ends up back in prison at Sing Sing. This motivating set up for the rest of the story registers as kind of clumsy under the direction of Henry Hathaway, and much of the dialogue — though it’s co-scripted by talented former journalist Ben Hecht — is rather stilted.
The story, based on a novel by former prosecutor Eleazar Lipsky (unlike Trump’s cabinet picks, this crew at least had considerable professional cred), is a bit spotty and hard to follow, quirks which IMHO haunt a lot of Noir. Nick’s wife Maria commits suicide while he’s imprisoned, but partly because she’s not portrayed in the script, we don’t really know much about why she stuck her head in the oven, nor why Nick later falls head-over-heels for his nanny Nettie, other than that she’s gorgeous and nice. Somehow or other they end up married after Nick is released from prison and from parole. There are lots of shadows along the way.
Also murky, and not particularly compelling, is Nick’s becoming an agent for an assistant district attorney (stolidly portrayed by Brian Donlevy), which puts him on the wrong side of psychopathic killer Tommy, enacted by future star Richard Widmark in his film debut. Widmark later revealed that his hyena-laughing approach to this creepy scumbag character was influenced by The Joker in the Batman cartoon series. His creation comes close to stealing almost every one of his scenes in Kiss of Death, though Gray’s natural innocence and affection are also compelling.
Mature becomes somewhat more interesting and credible as the 99-minute film wears on, particularly in the scenes with his young children, who’ve been sequestered in an orphanage after the death of their mother. A final stakeout and shootout pump some adrenaline into the script in the final ‘act’.
Sometimes you have to reflect on Noir titles. There was no connection between any ‘kiss’ and the several ‘deaths’ in the film reviewed above. In The Sleeping City, the only obvious sleeping is with bit players playing patients in the hospital setting of the film, which qualifies it as ‘semi-documentary’. Directed by George Sherman, the story about drug-running and illegal off-track betting among physicians was filmed at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, prompting the disgruntled real-life mayor of New York City to insist that lead actor Richard Conte start the movie with a short insistence that both setting and story weree fictional and that the real Bellevue was a state-of-the-art shrine of medical integrity and competency.
The cinematography here, by the acclaimed Bill Miller, shows more purposeful craft than that of the preceding film. There are numerous high-angle and low-angle shots, and psychological grouping of characters evocative of the later camera work, for Ingmar Bergman and other directors, of Sven Nykvist. “Audiences get tired of dressed-up stuff,” Miller once commented. “They want to see something real. There’s never yet been a studio set that could give the same effect as the actual location.”
That same standard doesn’t necessarily apply to scripting, though. The grilling of Conte’s character Fred Rowan, who’s installed in the hospital staff under an alias to help investigate the suicide of a resident physician, and the new residents’ extended sour of the facilities, are realistic, but not all that interesting. Fred’s agitated roommate, an intern named Steve driven to suicide and played by Alex Nico, comes off as more compelling than Conte’s solemn Rowan.
Coleen Gray once again shines some attractive light on the procedures as nurse Ann Sebastian. She’s closer to femme fatale function here when it’s revealed, late in the story, that she’s in cahoots with the aging elevator operator Pop Ware, played by Richard Taber, who’s revealed as both a bookie and a conduit for purloined narcotics. It’s hard to know how to take Taber’s Ware, who transmutes from an annoying ancient to a nefarious antagonist before he’s dispatched in a rooftop shootout.
Ann’s arc travels from Fred’s inevitable love interest to a moll to whom he declares, “I’m sorry — you’re under arrest.” Overall, the arc of this story, scripted by the otherwise impressive Jo Eisinger, doesn’t go very high or very far. Fortunately, the script fits more naturally than Kiss of Death’s and contains a few funny lines, such as, “I’d like to get to know your dog.”
Do take the chance to get to know Noir City better, and experience the majesty of the Grand Lake.
Noir City 22 ran at the Grand Lake Theater from January 24-February 2, 2025.
Our coverage from other nights of the festival:
The Narrow Margin and Hell’s Half Acre, review by Vita Hewitt
The Killing, review by Agustín Maes
Raw Deal and Mary Ryan, Detective, review by Fred Noland
Caged and Tomorrow is Another Day, review by Sarah Bass
