The Moving Image Source Calendar is a selective international guide to retrospectives, screenings, festivals, and exhibitions.
Descriptions are drawn from the calendars of the presenting venues.
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Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis
August 1-23, 2008 at
Pacific Film Archive
, Berkeley, CA
It's surprising that pulp writer David Goodis never named a novel Cul-de-Sac. His stories conjure a dead end, littered with the wreckage of lonely losers and lowlifes. An ill fate befalls the typical Goodis fall guy, who often glimpses the high life, however fleetingly, but then through some irascible compulsion or sinister defect must stumble back to the seamy streets. Goodis's own life follows the same pattern: at age thirty, he saw his novel Dark Passage adapted for the screen and parlayed that into a contract at Warner Bros., but his questionable proclivities made him an outcast even in Hollywood. Back in his hometown of Philadelphia, he churned out paperback originals while prowling the seedy saloons with unguarded desire. At age forty-nine, he was dead of cirrhosis. Though Goodis persisted in relative obscurity, his works falling in and out of print, filmmakers mined his shady novels for their criminal content. Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall and Paul Wendkos's The Burglar were grim highlights of the American mid-fifties, while across the pond, cinema's continental ops found his soiled vision most suitable for their noir knockoffs. Truffaut's fanciful but faithful Shoot the Piano Player was the first in a lineup of a half-dozen suspects, all with a French accent. Goodis's pulp is not about plot; it's about the struggles of his beautiful losers to free themselves from sordid obsession and inbred failure. It's also about Goodis's smothering fixation with the fall-from grace, perhaps, or just from the curb to the gutter.
Featured Works:
Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947); The Unfaithful (Vincent Sherman, 1947); Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1957); The Burglar (Paul Wendkos, 1957); Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste, François Truffaut, 1960, pictured); And Hope to Die (La course du lièvre à travers les champs, René Clément, 1972); Moon In the Gutter (La lune dans le caniveau, Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1983); Descent Into Hell (Descente aux enfers, Francis Girod, 1986); The Professional Man (Nicholas Kazan, 1989); The Professional Man (Steven Soderbergh, 1995)
Program information:
Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis
Related Articles:
No Exit by Max Goldberg posted Aug. 11, 2008