Metro Cinema Society: Film Noir

Film Noir

Journey back with us to Hollywood in the 1940s, a time period rich in film noir, for an exciting selection of some of its finest treasures. In a world steeped with paranoia and crime, darkness and double-crossing, we offer up four film classics. Double Indemnity and Criss Cross in February and two more in March: Gilda and Shadow of a Doubt, all in glorious 35mm!

Professor Bill Beard, from the University of Alberta Film Studies Department, will give a brief introduction at the first screening of each film.

Noir: Double Indemnity

Director: Billy Wilder

USA 1944, 106 min, 35mm

Feb 17 & 21 @ 7pm
Feb 19 @ 2pm

Film noir _par excellence_. Fred MacMurray, as Walter Neff, staggers into an office, a fresh bullet wound in his side, and proceeds to offer a remarkable confession into a Dictaphone: “I killed Dietrichson. Me, Walter Neff, insurance salesman, 35 years... view more

Noir: Criss Cross

Director: Robert Siodmak

USA 1949, 87 min, 35mm

Feb 25 & 28 @ 7pm
Feb 26 @ 2pm

A first-rate, fatalistic urban nightmare, _Criss Cross_ comes from noir stalwart and stylist Robert Siodmak, one of the key contributors to the genre’s aesthetic. Burt Lancaster plays brooding armoured car guard Steve Thompson, whose life has been on a drunken... view more

Noir: Gilda

Director: Charles Vidor

USA 1946, 110 min, 35mm

Mar 17 & 20 @ 7pm
Mar 18 @ 3pm

Noir misogyny and Hollywood glamour hit memorable peaks in this lavish, big-budget melodrama set in a stylish, studio-bound Buenos Aires. A sexually ambiguous Glenn Ford plays Johnny Farrell, a down-and-out gambler hired as the right-hand man of a German casino... view more

Noir: Shadow of a Doubt

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

USA 1943, 108 min, 35mm

Mar 23 & 27 @ 7pm
Mar 25 @ 4pm

<...>A dark, disturbing dissection of small-town, white-picket-fence America (and something of a 1940s precursor to David Lynch’s _Blue Velvet_), _Shadow of a Doubt_ is set in the sleepy Californian community of Santa Rosa, and pivots on the unusually close bond... view more