French noir series highlights the forgotten Robert Hossein
Busting out of the studio and onto the streets, the group of former film critics turned young auteurs broke conventions through adventurous subversions of normal narrative structure and jarring editing techniques.
For the third straight year, programmer and film historian Don Malcolm is picking through the collateral damage to find truly great and forgotten movies and artists in his 15-film series at the Roxie Theater, The French Had a Name for It:
The series, made up of films that are mostly not available in any form in the United States, begins with a terrific one-two punch from 1939 on Thursday, Nov. 3, with Marcel Carne’s poetic realist take on murder and sexuality starring Jean Gabin, “Le jour se leve” (“Daybreak”), and the first adaptation of James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Pierre Chenal’s “Le dernier tournant” (“The Last Turn”).
The festival closes Monday, Nov. 7, with a voluptuous pair from the 1940s by Jean Delannoy, whom Malcolm calls a “New Wave whipping boy,” as he was a practitioner of Josef von Sternberg-like glamour and excess.
A triple threat — he often writes, directs and stars — Hossein touched a chord with audiences at the Roxie previously with films such as “The Wicked Go to Hell” and “Blonde in a White Car.”
A fascinating fellow, Hossein often worked with crime novelist Frédéric Dard — the Raymond Chandler of France — and his father, Andre Hossein, who wrote some pretty cool jazzy scores that drip with the proper irony.
Eight hours later, the mini-Hossein tribute ends with the bizarre 1965 locked room mystery “Le jeu de la verite” (“The Game of Truth”) in which one of a dozen or so know-it-all guests from high society — including a young Jean-Louis Trintignant — has committed a murder.
Hossein is good as a brooding serial killer in “Le Vampire de Dusseldorf” (“The Secret Killer”) and a crusader against a white slavery racket in “Des femmes disparaissent” (“The Road to Shame”), but I was most struck by the twisted, complex marriage depicted in “Les scelerats” (“The Wretches”).
Werner Herzog appears in person at the Castro Theatre for a special screening, sponsored by the San Francisco Film Society, of his new documentary about Volcanoes, “Into the Inferno.”
On deck: “It Came from Beneath the Sea” (giant octopus attacks San Francisco) on Nov. 10 and the exceptionally imaginative “This Island, Earth” (friendly aliens invade, enlist U.S. scientists for help) on Nov. 17.