Dark Dreams: The Original Film Noir Series
General Admission Series Ticket, Nine Films, 7:30 pm Shows
more info
Ticket for all nine films.
$90.00
$97.52
with fees
Members Series Ticket, Nine Films, 7:30 pm Shows
more info
Ticket for all nine films. Members of SIFF, SAM, Festa Italiana, Alliance Francaise de Seattle, UW Cinema Studies, Cornish, SFI,TheFilmSchool, Scarecrow Video, KING FM.
$80.00
$86.69
with fees
Wednesday Sept 27 Single Ticket: DOUBLE INDEMNITY, 7:30 pm
more info
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944). Many say film noir started here, in the warm honeysuckle air, the white stucco mansion, the wife (Barbara Stanwyck) wearing only a towel, wanting to take out an insurance policy on her husband. Insurance man Fred MacMurray is smitten by the hot gust of her sexual allure, and their steamy verbal exchanges (penned by noir word master Raymond Chandler, from James M. Cain's novel) raise our temperatures. Hooked on each other, they'll follow a dark plan "to the end of the line." But MacMurray also loves his boss (Edward G. Robinson), a fatherly, intuitive man with a built in lie detector. Film noir visuals may be crisp black and white, but noir dwells in a foggy zone of moral complexity, where a kiss can whisper like a gunshot. With the fateful, forward-driving music of Miklos Rozsa. 106 min.
$15.00
$16.25
with fees
Wednesday Oct 4 Single Ticket: CRISS CROSS, 7:30 pm
more info
CRISS CROSS (Robert Siodmak,1949). Often in film noir, passionate narrators obsessed with the past share their fever dreams of longing. Alluring Yvonne De Carlo says she and her man have been together "from the start." And rugged Burt Lancaster says "From the start it all went one way, it was fate." Now they're divorced, but they find each other again. Trouble is, she's set to marry slick con man Dan Duryea, and Lancaster's Police Detective buddy Stephen McNally becomes a player in the drama. A clear path seems set, as Lancaster teams with Duryea on a big armored car robbery, but fate is still pulling the strings. With impish character actor Percy Helton, Miklos Rozsa's compelling music. 87 min.
$15.00
$16.25
with fees
Wednesday Oct 11 Single Ticket: BLACK ANGEL, 7:30 pm
more info
BLACK ANGEL (Roy William Neill, 1946). In film noir actors are able to embody characters beyond the boundaries of their usual, expected personas. Dan Duryea is one of noir's iconic villains, but here he's a sympathetic composer who drinks too much. When Duryea's mean ex-wife (Constance Dowling) is murdered, tough cop Broderick Crawford suspects him, but Duryea was locked in his room that night by a friend, passed out in an alcoholic haze. Dowling was a nasty blackmailer, and one of her victims (John Phillips) is locked up for her murder. Phillips' wife (June Vincent) believes him to be innocent, and enlists Duryea to sleuth out the real killer. They go underground as performers at a nightclub owned by Peter Lorre, who had shady dealings with Dowling in the past. Even if Phillips proves innocent, he was a scoundrel, so Duryea hopes Vincent can hear the melodies sent straight from his heart. From the perverse sensibility of noir novelist Cornell Woolrich. 83 min.
$15.00
$16.25
with fees
Wednesday Oct 18 Single Ticket: SUNSET BOULEVARD, 7:30 pm
more info
SUNSET BOULEVARD (Billy Wilder, 1950). Glenn Close did a stellar job of portraying Norma Desmond on Broadway. But no one can top Gloria Swanson--age appropriate to Norma, having once been, like her, the toast of silent films--playing a forgotten sister of the Hollywood Dream family. Aged Norma, a slave to staying beautiful and young, occupying her decaying mansion, feeling lost, dead to the world. She needs the pulse of new blood, in the form of screenwriter William Holden. For him she's delusional, pathetic, almost grotesque, but her aura of Old Hollywood is seductive. She's a dark, dangerous enchantress who means it when she purrs, "Mad about the boy." With Erich Von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Jack Webb (before DRAGNET), Buster Keaton. 115 min.
$15.00
$16.25
with fees
Tuesday Oct 24 Single Ticket: IN A LONELY PLACE, 7:30 pm
more info
IN A LONELY PLACE (Nicholas Ray, 1950). King of Film Noir Humphrey Bogart found his greatest role as a gifted screenwriter who's "killed dozens of people...in my films." He's a sensitive artist who doesn't suffer fools--and tells them so. Arrogant, alienated, he's in a prison of his own making, And soon maybe behind steel bars, after a woman he was with is found murdered. Director Ray, a poet of poignant emotions, studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, and he renders Bogart's courtyard apartment complex as a map of existential choices. Opposite Bogart's bungalow lives a woman (Gloria Grahame) who's stirred by him and gives him an alibi for "that night." Maybe lonely night winds also bring love. With Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid. 94 min.
$15.00
$16.25
with fees
Thursday Nov 2 Single Ticket: CHINATOWN, 7:30 pm
more info
CHINATOWN (Roman Polanski, 1974). Set in 1938, this film ushered in the late-20th-century new wave of noir cinema, though its tale is timeless as human greed, corruption, sexual transgression, madness. At a time when America's self-confident hubris was being battered by the godawful Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, political assassinations, Richard Nixon's machinations; when Roman Polanski's wife and unborn child had been slaughtered by the Manson Family; when screenwriter Robert Towne felt Los Angeles, the place and its history in his bloodstream, and Jack Nicholson was in his sly, cocky bad-ass prime, a movie drenched in sunshine beauty and existential dread was made. Chinatown, a metaphor for the mind's hidden places, a zone where the best intentions do no good. A perfect movie, many say, aided and abetted by the glorious Faye Dunaway, and haunted by fatherly John Huston. John A. Alonzo's camera captures the creamy Los Angeles light that spawned the movie industry; the midnight trumpet of Jerry Goldsmith's music laments what might have been. 131 min.
$15.00
$16.25
with fees
Thursday Nov 9 Single Ticket: THE BIG LEBOWSKI 25th ANNIVERSARY, 7:30 pm
more info
THE BIG LEBOWSKI 25th ANNIVERSARY (Ethan and Joel Coen, 1998). Esteemed critic-author David Thomson calls LEBOWSKI "a key work of 20th-century culture," and beyond, for the Dude (Jeff Bridges) abides, he being a soft-boiled man of inaction, Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe in slacker mode, as conjured by the pop culture-savvy Coen brothers. Like a Taoist Master, the Dude goes with the flow, even when it becomes a chaotic tsunami of mistaken identities, kidnapping, missing money, bowling with friends, White Russian cocktails, tangling with nihilists, unanswered questions quickly replaced by new ones. The Dude's the still point in the center, "taking it easy for all us sinners." With John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sam Elliott, David Huddleston. 25th Anniversary restoration. 117 min.
$15.00
$16.25
with fees
Thursday Nov 16 Single Ticket: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, 7:30 pm
more info
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007). To say that the Coen brothers' cinematic talents are deep and wide is an understatement. They can conjure THE BIG LEBOWSKI's rambling realm of enchanted, overflowing wackiness, then win Oscars for writing and directing Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy's (1933-2023) pared down, piercing West Texas existential tale, which also won Best Picture. In heat and light rendered with the intensity of Camus' THE STRANGER, an open-range hunter (Josh Brolin) happens upon a drug deal gone bad, and a case bulging with $2 million. It's not his, but he takes it, and one Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), like a biblical personification of walking Dread, comes to retrieve it and wreak havoc as he travels the searing land. But a philosophical peacekeeper on horseback, sheriff Tommy Lee Jones, also lives in these parts. Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins (BLADE RUNNER 2049, 1917), as he did in BIG LEBOWSKI, works his magic with light. He and the Coen's give us vast plains of space--but where can you hide? With Kelly Macdonald, Woody Harrelson.122 min.
$15.00
$16.25
with fees
Thursday Nov 30 Single Ticket: EYES WIDE SHUT, 7:30 pm
more info
EYES WIDE SHUT (1999). Stanley Kubrick (1929-2007) loved David Lynch's films, and Lynch loves Kubrick's work. Lynch feels we're all detectives in life, confronted with mysteries, searching for clues and meanings. In Kubrick's final film, top-of-the-world New York doctor Tom Cruise's cushy, stable existence becomes a dark labyrinth of doubt and suspicion when his lovely wife (Nicole Kidman) tells him, "If you men only knew what we women think and do." Suddenly unsure of her faithfulness, Cruise embarks on an aesthetically stunning nocturnal mystery quest steeped in desire, fear, and strangely eroticized encounters. Is he acting out a new sense of freedom, seeking sexual revenge, or yearning to get back to his comfy home nest? EYES is based on DREAM BOOK by Arthur Schnitzler, a contemporary of Freud's in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Freud said he gained his psychological knowledge through diligent study and experimentation, while Schnitzler felt he amassed his insights through imagination and intuition, the wellsprings of Lynch's creative process. People experience Lynch's and Kubrick's films and ask, "Is it all a dream?" To the human psyche, our mind-body consciousness, waking and dream life are both real. With Sydney Pollack, Marie Richardson, Todd Field, and a rare Kubrick cameo. 159 min.
$15.00
$16.25
with fees
Greg Olson Productions Presents
DARK DREAMS: THE ORIGINAL FILM NOIR SERIES
Dark dreams, the steamy glow of desire and danger, hot jazz riffs after midnight. The allure of easy money and forever love. Blast past the speed limit, the heart rules—or does chance, the phantom gambler, the trickster you trust? Who'll be left standing when the morning comes?
Nine films at the historic single-screen SIFF Cinema Egyptian Theater on Capitol Hill. Sixty years of noir style, stories, and reflections of America, from the 1940s to the 2000s. A big wide screen, dazzling restorations, free opening night Top Pot Doughnuts in black and white, pre-film Noir Music Playlist by Tova Gannana.
Cultural commentator and author Charles R. Cross (HEAVIER THAN HEAVEN: THE BIOGRAPHY OF KURT COBAIN) says, "Greg Olson is Seattle's all-time-best film curator, and this series hits it out of the park by including some of my favorite films—and some of the best films of all time—along with a few modern movies that would not exist without noir influence."
Film Professor Dr. John Trafton (MOVIE-MADE LOS ANGELES) adds, "DARK DREAMS is a thrilling and mesmerizing journey for die hard noir fans and the uninitiated—there's so much to love here, from classics to the unexpected and challenging."
Member Series Ticket, nine films for $80: SIFF, SAM, Festa Italiana, UW Cinema and Media Studies, Alliance Francaise de Seattle, NWFF, SFI, TheFilmSchool, NWFF, Scarecrow Video and KING FM.
General Public Series Ticket, nine films for $90.
Single ticket for all, $15.
The Egyptian Theater has nearby parking, bars, and restaurants, and offers full concessions, including beer and wine. Vintage dressing and mask-wearing welcome.
Shadows fall soon. Be ready. Check out the image parade below.
