I Wake Up Dreaming Night 2

This week's programming showcased a triple-feature. Chinatown at Midnight, Dangerous Blondes and Mysterious Intruder. Unfortunately, due to my teaching schedule, I was unable to make the first film. I would have loved to have seen it as it was set in San Francisco's Chinatown. I always enjoying watching classic films set in San Francisco. Nonetheless, I was entertained by the remaining two films.

Dangerous Blondes was billed as a 1943 Film Noir Comedy. That's quite a contradiction considering the serious/dramatic mood of a film noir where as comedy tends to be lighter. I didn't view this as a noir comedy as much I thought of it more as satire. The film noir style was definitely present as though the director was attempting (successfully) to include every technical noir nuance such as:

• High Contrast Chiaroscuro
• Shadows
• Frames
• Mirror/Reflections
• Choker Close-ups
• Angled Shots
• Imbalanced Composition

As for its plot and characterization, the archetypes were there:

• Mounting Body Count
• Investigator
• Thugs
• Dames
• Urban location
• Rain
• Smoking and Drinking

The acting was lighthearted as well as the music composition. The female lead, Evelyn Keyes, exhibited wit and sarcasm to balance her character with her somewhat dimwitted husband.

The highlight for me was Ann Savage's presence. Known best for her femme fatale role in Detour, it was refreshing seeing her in a more campy role even though her character was trying to take herself seriously. Good acting. You just have to love her mourning hat.

Mysterious Intruder: The evening's final film. Now this was a strange one. The film begins with a walking shadow who narrates the film. At first, I thought he was part of the story whose identification would emerge by film's end. Instead, the shadow was just a whistling, omniscient narrator. My friend Annabelle (who met me and another mutual friend at Castro Theatre) were puzzled by this. We felt it unnecessary. Upon research, however, I learned this was part of the "Whistler" series of films (eight total) based off an original radio broadcast. Hence the poster's tagline: "A Whistler Picture".

The film was actually quite good plot wise though incredibly complex. It's the story of a corrupt private investigator hired to find a missing woman who stands to inherit a lost fortune. The elderly gentleman who hired him finally gets a visit from the woman he was searching for before getting 86'd. Then things get weird. The woman was an imposter hired by the investigator. What?

Like the previous film, it had all the technical elements though far darker. The women were quite angular; I'll go so far as to say they were hatchet faces. And those clothes! Their shoulder pads can put out an eye!

The plot continues on a treasure hunt to find this mysterious lost treasure which, of course, results in more murders. The real missing woman finally turns up for a few scenes only to disappear and never to be heard from again. She was more the MacGuffin of this film than the treasure. Despite some of the confusing elements, it was worth watching for the benefit of analyzing the film.

Until next week...