25th annual Film Noir festival shines light on dark classics in city more suited to host it than many might realize

At first glance, Palm Springs doesn’t seem like the right fit for a Film Noir festival. The city that is bathed in sunlight for 350 days a year and dotted with colorful mid century modern architecture stands in sharp contrast to the perpetually overcast and monochrome tones that characterize Film Noir.

Just beneath the surface, however, Palm Springs has its own unique atmosphere and seedy underbelly that makes it the perfect location for the The Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival. The oppressive heat and constant sunlight eventually leech the color out of anything left outside, while our frequent sandstorms are not dissimilar to the cloudy and smoky rooms typical of Film Noir movies. 

The city was a “haven for mobsters” according to local writer Bruce Fessier, who chronicled an era where mafiosos and consiglieres hung around the El Mirador Hotel and other downtown hotspots. 

With all this history, Arthur Lyons founded the festival in 2000 to fill a specific void in the city’s film programming.

The festival grew out of writer’s conferences held by Lyons, a local mystery writer who grew up in Palm Springs and attended Palm Springs High School. The current festival director Alan Rode said the Film Noir festival was born organically out of this group of writers reminiscing on their favorite movies. 

Rode has been involved with the festival almost since the beginning, and took over in 2008 when Lyons passed away.

The Film Noir festival is celebrating its quarter century anniversary with a packed schedule of film screenings and conversations this weekend. A dozen films will be screened at the Historic Camelot Theatre at the Palm Springs Cultural Center starting Thursday.

Rest assured, if you’ve attended the festival before, there won’t be any repeats. “Film Noir is the gift that keeps on giving,” said Rode. “More or less by serendipity rather than design I’ve never shown the same film twice.”

The festival attracts cineastes from as far away as Australia, Rode said, but the core audience has always been Palm Springs locals.

“The Palm Springs audience is so loyal and I love them dearly,” he said. The way Rode describes the annual event, it sounds like a family reunion that happens to have great films.

“Although the films are dark, the mood certainly isn’t.”

Rode wants the festival and others like it to keep running for a long time. That’s why preservation remains top of mind for him and other organizers. Not just preservation of the physical films themselves, but also preservation of previous interviews and talks given by actors and filmmakers who have since passed away.

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the film festival, Rode will be showing clips from previous talks with guests like Ernest Borgnine, Barbara Hale, Norman Lloyd, Marsha Hunt, and Jon Polito.

Though most of the films are digital, there will be a few screened in 35mm format. What matters, Rode said, is that the films will be shown on one of the largest screens in the Coachella Valley, as the directors intended. 

“These films were designed to be seen in the theater in the dark, as a communal event,” said Rode. “Not sitting at home where someone can pause the movie to get a can of Budweiser from the refrigerator.” 

The hallmarks of the Film Noir style are best appreciated on a massive screen so the audience can really see the camera angles and sharp contrast between light and shadow.

When sharing a film with others, it somehow feels more tense and crackling with energy. Everyone around you holds their breath and watches as the hardboiled detective is betrayed by the femme fatale in the end.

The tropes of Film Noir are well-known and often parodied, but Rode has hand-selected a program featuring some classics, obscure picks, and genre-blending films.

On offer this weekend is a wide array of films demonstrating the flexibility of the Film Noir style. “We’ve got some great films that run the gamut from Sherlock Holmes [in “The Scarlet Claw”] to Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite of his own films, ‘Shadow of a Doubt.’”

Among the many highlights, on opening night, Rode said they will be screening “probably the best boxing movie of all time,” “Body and Soul” from 1947 and he will be joined in conversation by actor and writer Jim Beaver.

Friday the festival is screening “Border Incident” from 1949 about illegal immigration in the Southwest. Rode said the film is just as topical today as when it was made. Rode will be joined by Luis Reyes, author of “Viva Hollywood: The Legacy of Latin and Hispanic Artists in American Film.”

Saturday features several screenings, including a Noir Western, “Day of the Outlaw.” Actor and filmmaker Mike McGreevey will be a part of that film’s conversation. Eddie Muller, host of Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies, will also be a part of the festival.

With film preservation at the center of the festival, Rode wonders if his efforts are in vain. He knows that some turn their nose up at anything before the new millenia and won’t even consider watching something in black and white. 

But, he said, “Film Noir is about the basic human condition and knowing what you’re doing is wrong, but doing it anyway.”

“There’s a connectivity of the story to modern day life, because although technology has changed, people are basically the same when you get down to it.”

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Details: The festival runs from Thursday through Sunday. Tickets can be purchased online here.

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