Palm Springs’ Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival Celebrates 25th Year

The days are getting longer everywhere, except Palm Springs, where darkness is on the ascent each May. That’s when the city plays host to the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary May 9-12 with a program of a dozen classic films from the 1940s and ’50s. Great directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Rossen, Andre de Toth and Anthony Mann and stars like Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan will have desert dwellers and visitors alike eager to blot out the sun for four days, culminating in the festival’s customary Mother’s Day crime spree.

As always, the festival is curated and hosted by a face familiar to any serious modern-day noir aficionado, Alan K. Rode, one of the principals of the Film Noir Foundation and a co-host of the Noir City festival every April in Hollywood. (He’s also an annual presenter at the TCM Classic Film Festival, where he just introduced the classic noir “Night Has a Thousand Eyes.”) Rode’s Noir City cohort, Eddie Muller, will also be on hand to introduce some of the screenings this weekend at the Palm Springs Cultural Center, formerly the 1960s-era Camelot Theatre.

Like the Hollywood-based festival that came to be renamed Noir City, the Arthur Lyons Festival is hitting the quarter-century mark, with memories of a time 25 years ago when noir was still really more the province of pure cineastes, as opposed to the household genre it’s become by now. It takes a loyal audience to keep a festival going that long, of course, and Rode has one, with an audience made up primarily of dedicated Palm Springs-area locals but also a share of L.A. film buffs who didn’t get their noir quota quite filled with the American Cinematheque-hosted series in April.

“The reason this festival remains viable after 25 years is the support of the audience,” says Rode. “I mean, people love these films. They love coming there. And I think that there’s a relaxed vibe about Palm Springs, and the way the films are set up, you can actually go to a film, go out and get something to eat, relax, have a drink, and then come back and see another film.” (Or stay on the premises for cocktails at the theater’s upstairs bar.) “It’s not, ‘Oh my God, we gotta go, we’re gonna miss this,’ and you don’t have to worry about valet parking or traffic or any of that stuff.” Only on screen is anyone (or everyone) in a jam, at this noir fest, in other words.

Still from ‘Dead Reckoning’

Rode has been involved with the festival for almost its entire history, having come on two years after the first edition unspooled in 2000. “It was started by Arthur Lyons and Craig Prater, and a number of people underwrote it, and then it was basically the late Rick and Rose Supple who owned the Camelot Theatre and were great philanthropists and owned radio stations in Palm Springs,” Rode says. “And now, all of those people have passed from the scene, except for Craig. who will be there, I hope. So I’ve been the director, programmer, producer and whatever title one wants to give for 17 years, after Arthur sadly passed away in the beginning of 2008. [It was at that point that the former Palm Springs Film Noir Festival was officially renamed after Lyons.] Without Arthur and without the Supples, we wouldn’t be here to celebrate 25 years. I’ve continued to program a mixture of well-known titles and new discoveries, and somehow in 17 years, I’ve never repeated a film. it’s less a matter of some sort of deliberate design on my part, and it’s more a matter of serendipity.

“Because I’ll look and see that I’ve never shown ‘Body and Soul,’ one of the great John Garfield pictures, and one of the greatest pictures ever made with boxing as a motif. So I’m gonna show that on opening night Thursday and have Jim Beaver (“Deadwood,” “Justified”), the great actor, film historian, writer, and a friend of mine, to talk about Garfield, who he wrote a biography about, as well as talk about his career and all the different things that he did, including living with character actor Hank Worden for about 15 years when he first came to Hollywood.”

For a Friday matinee of “Border Incident,” Rode’s guest for the introduction will be Luis Reyes, the author of “Viva Hollywood: The Legacy of Latin and Hispanic Artists in American Film.” “It’s a film about workers coming across the southern border, which I think is probably more topical now than it was in 1949,” Rode says. “It was directed by Anthony Mann and stars Ricardo Montalbán, who MGM actually let play the nationality that he was, as an undercover Mexican policeman trying to crack down on smugglers. (Noir cinematography icon) John Alton shot a lot of day-for-night photography, and it’s filled with great actors, including the one and only Charles McGraw. A very, very tough film.”

Sadly, many of the actual stars of the film noir era of the ’40s and ’50s who used to turn up as guests at this and other noir fests have moved on to that great heist aftermath in the sky. On Saturday, however, Rode does have one of the actors from “Day of the Outlaw” on hand, albeit one who was a child actor at the time.

“‘Day of the Outlaw’ is a noir Western, and a really, really strong film, filmed up near Bend, Oregon in ‘59. It was Andre De Toth’s last Western, with Robert Ryan, Tina Louise, Nehemiah Persoff, Burl Ives and a really strong cast, including Mike McGreevey, who’s been in the business for over 60 years, who started out as a child actor with Jane Powell and Alan Ladd and all of these people. His father was in the TV business, and Michael ended up producing the show ‘Fame’ and writing, directing — he did a great TV movie on Lee Harvey Oswald with his dad. Mike’s just a super guy and a great raconteur, so I’m looking forward to that.” (Ride will have plenty to say about the subject of noir Westerns himself — he wrote the book on another one, “Blood on the Moon.”)

On the afternoon of the final day, Sunday, Rode has programmed “the only Budd Boetticher film with a female protagonist (Nina Foch), ‘Escape in the Fog,’ which runs a very trim 65 minutes, and I’m going to have Kirk Ellis there. Kirk just recently wrote and produced the ‘Franklin’ miniseries starring Michael Douglas, and also did the award-winning ‘John Adams’ series of several years ago on HBO — and Kirk has written a book on one of Boetticher’s films, ‘Ride Lonesome,’ and he worked with Boetticher and knows a lot about him.”

Other highlights include a Sherlock Holmes film from 1944 that Rode considers a noir, “The Scarlet Claw”; “Crime Wave,” the second de Toth-directed film on the menu for the weekend; “Dead Reckoning,” with two of the true faces of noir, Bogart and Lizabeth Scott; “The Enforcer,” a second Bogart film, and the last one he did for Warner Bros. in 1951; “Across the Bridge” with Rod Steiger, which Rode calls “an unbelievably gut-punching, strong film”; and, as the closing film on Sunday afternoon, “Shadow of a Doubt,” cited as a favorite of Hitchcock’s among his own work.

The Camelot is equipped to show 35mm (and also 70mm, although that is never going to be a concern at a film noir festival). But while the inclusion of multiple 35 prints was once a selling point for the Arthur Lyons Festival, as it also was for Noir City, this year Rode says only a couple of the selected films — including “Escape in the Fog” — will be in 35. The sad fact is that some studios are not letting any of their 35mm prints out of the vault any more, and on the occasions they do, sometimes the films show up in not great shape. But going mostly digital doesn’t make for a second-class experience of these movies.

“The studios are not making any more 35 millimeter prints unless it’s a tentpole movie of some kind, and good prints are hard to get,” says Rode. “You know, with the films that Eddie Muller and I are restoring (for) the Film Noir Foundation, we’re increasingly doing digital restorations. We still do photochemical, but it’s become a digital world. And quite frankly, my philosophy on this is, I want to capture the best available image. So if I have a choice between showing a grade-C print with splices and scratches on it, or showing a DCP or a digital rendition that is all cleaned up and restored, what’s better for my audience? It’s become that showing digital films not only is often a cost-effective solution, sometimes it’s the only solution. So I program the films on what I think my audience responds to and what they like, and then when I go after the films, I go after what is the best available mode of showing this film to the audience.”

The programming for the Palm Springs fest is spread out so that after one film on opening night, there are four films a day on Friday and Saturday, and three on Sunday — adding up to that most oxymoronic of festival experiences: a relaxed marathon. And it’s a chance to see a crisp rendering of “Shadow of a Doubt” in the shadow of the San Jacinto Mountains.

Full weekend passes (for $149) and tickets for individual programs (at $14.50) can be purchased in advance here.

The 2024 schedule:

Thursday May 9 Opening Night

7:30 PM Body and Soul (1947)

Friday May 10

10:00 AM The Scarlet Claw (1944)

1:00 PM Border Incident (1949)

4:00 PM No Man of Her Own (1950)

7:30 PM Across the Bridge (1957)

Saturday May 11

10:00 AM Crime Wave (1954)

1:00 PM Dead Reckoning (1946)