In the very first scene of Elliot Lavine’s final I Wake Up Dreaming noir festival at the Castro Theatre, Los Angeles is a vibrant city at night, teeming with bright lights (Roy William Neill’s “The Black Angel”).
Lavine made his mark in the 1990s as a longtime programmer for the Roxie Film Center, with eclectic festivals of all kinds, most notably film noir from the 1940s and ’50s and pre-Code films from the 1930s.
The 11-film series, unspooling on Wednesdays in August at the Castro, begins Wednesday, Aug. 3, with a double feature of “The Black Angel,” which puts Dan Duryea and Peter Lorre through a labyrinthine framed-for-murder plot that is a hallmark of writer Cornell Woolrich; and “Nightmare Alley,” Edmund Goulding’s twisted movie about a mind reader/swindler (Tyrone Power) caught between two women (Joan Blondell, Helen Walker).
Other highlights include “The Killer That Stalked New York” (Aug. 17), in which the villain is a virus and the femme fatale is Evelyn Keyes; “Female on the Beach” (Aug. 24), a Joan Crawford potboiler; and a Mike Hammer movie, “Kiss of Death” (Aug. 31), which happens to be one of the greatest noirs ever.
Start with a rare screening of “Under Age,” a lurid tale of teenage prostitution that’s an early gem from future A-list director Edward Dmytryk (“Murder My Sweet,” “The Caine Mutiny”); move on to the visually dreamy and influential “I Wake Up Screaming,” which inspired the title of Lavine’s noir festivals (“one of the earliest bona fide noirs,” Lavine says); and finish off with the ultra-weird “The Monster and the Girl,” which bizarrely blends noir and horror.
Careful of passing cars as you stumble out of the theater after that evening of head-spinning entertainment.
