Film noir returns to the Cinematheque with the summer’s hottest double bill
Rita Hayworth and Alain Delon pair up for an opening-night sizzler featuring American noir classic Gilda and French neo-noir Le samouraï
Rita Hayworth takes all the blame as the femme fatale at the centre of Charles Vidor’s all-time classic noir, Gilda
The Cinematheque presents Film Noir 2024 from August 1 to September 5 and A Shadow Is Haunting the World: International Noir from August 1 to September 1
THE CINEMATHEQUE PRESENTS a blistering double bill for the opening night of its annual film noir series on Thursday, pairing the 1946 classic Gilda with Jean-Pierre Melville’s iconic 1967 thriller Le samouraï.
Either one is essential viewing and sexier than hell. Both arrive as crisp new restorations. On the eve of the season, artistic director Shaun Inouye tells Stir: “From the get-go we were shaping the program, both noir and [sister program] international noir around those two titles. They were the heaviest hitters to kick off both programs. Beyond that, within their respective genres, they’re such canonical, quintessential works.”
The golden era of American noir is usually traced back to the 1940s and ’50s, while its influence and appeal remain undiminished almost a century later. The Cinematheque debuted its summer series 30 years ago, amazingly, and it’s still packing ’em in with fresh programming. As Inouye notes, there’s a seemingly bottomless well of classics, represented this year by titles including White Heat (1949), Pickup on South Street (1953), and To Have and Have Not (1944). But there’s an even greater abundance of obscurities and minor gems—like Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence from 1948 or the pulpy Max Ophüls melodrama Caught, released a year later and also recently restored.
Gilda, however, towers above the era, making an international superstar and sex symbol out of Rita Hayworth—whose breathtaking entrance in the movie is as emblematic of Hollywood cinema as Marilyn’s billowing dress in The Seven Year Itch—while pushing its themes of jealousy and sexual warfare to the absolute limit. Glenn Ford co-stars as cagey hustler Johnny Farrell in this story of two former lovers brought together under hothouse circumstances in postwar Buenos Aires. A big part of the thrill is the film’s wickedly clever negotiation between audience desire and the Hays Code, drenching Charles Vidor’s film with ingenious innuendo.
“It’s smack in the middle of that perfect noir period,” says Inouye, “and I think it absorbs a lot of the anxieties that came from the war, particularly with men reintegrating into society and having these concerns about their wives, and what they were up to in their absence. And Gilda becomes this manifestation of it because it’s such a deeply cynical film about the relationship between the sexes. It’s also incredibly sensual, but it’s a savage film about passion and hate, and the lengths that lovers will go to punish each other if they feel scorned.”
The gloves come off, literally, during Hayworth’s legendary performance of “Put the Blame on Mame”. However we define “noir”—and there are plenty of arguments—here we have the indisputably noirish hallmarks of the world-weary male protagonist and the femme fatale inside an exotic underworld teeming with Nazis, cops, and other lowlifes. But for two wild minutes, Gilda also becomes a musical.
“It’s an incredibly horny performance,” remarks Inouye. “And clearly the fulcrum of the film, which is as obsessed with Rita Hayworth as the audience is. She almost breaks the fourth wall. It’s very titillating, and incredibly erotic, but it’s also deeply cruel, because you know that this striptease is purely to provoke Glenn Ford’s character. I just find that astonishing.”
In Le samouraï, the erotic charge is due to Alain Delon, already established in 1967 as French Cinema’s Most Beautiful Man and here mesmerizing the viewer with an inscrutable performance as the double-crossed hitman Jef Costello. In Jean-Pierre Melville’s ruthlessly spare film, which still feels impossibly modern in 2024, the past and the future combine under miraculous conditions.
“It’s very much an homage,” says Inouye, pointing, for one thing, to Costello’s wardrobe of trench coat and fedora—a motif lifted from Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire. “Beyond that it shares this cynical, pessimistic worldview that’s from noir, but Melville just completely strips it down to the bone and keeps it so incredibly austere and laconic. Lone wolf hitman betrayed by his employer with the cops in pursuit. That’s all it needs. And what’s so great about Melville: it feels as genuinely French as it does an homage to American Hollywood cinema.”
While spearheading the Cinematheque's concurrent program of international noir—the series also includes Mexico’s Victims of Sin (1951), Carol Reed’s British masterpiece The Third Man (1949) and Hong Kong’s operatically bloody My Heart Is That Eternal Rose (1989)—Le samouraï exists as a lodestone for the great filmmakers of the seventies and beyond. “It has become this kind of playbook for American and international filmmakers, to take what that film already did with noir and then run with its codes,” says Inouye, who points to David Fincher’s The Killer as a recent descendant of Melville’s enigmatic construction. “Before that with John Woo’s The Killer, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog is an obvious homage, Taxi Driver even borrows elements of it. Its tendrils are long and I think it’s still informing cinema today.” And, like Gilda, it still packs an unbelievable amount of heat. 
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