Don Malcolm’s ‘The French Had a Name for It’ festivals have transformed how we think about film noir (2024)

TheRoxie is hosting the latest — and potentially last — edition of this breakthrough festival series.

Dany Carrel in “A Trap for Cinderella.”

Photo: Midcentury Productions

A lot of what passes for film history isn’t even true.

Celebrities write— or have written for them— memoirs that are packed with lies. Academics, who often just want to get published, write about movies they haven’t seen. And then there are the books written during the film-book boom of the 1960s and 1970s, during which there was no home video, which meant authors were often writing about movies they saw once in a theater 20 years earlier.

During that boom, now 50 years in the past, certain orthodoxies were established about different genres, such as pre-Code movies and film noir— precepts that were either somewhat or entirely untrue. Unfortunately, just when the availability of movies on home video made it possible to correct these untruths, home video itself killed the boom in film books. Second-wave authors suddenly couldn’t get published, because the same audience that used to buy books about movies were now just buying the movies.

I had an experience with this phenomenon in the mid-1990s. After being warned off of pre-Code actress Norma Shearer by film scholars who didn’t even know her work, I saw a number of Shearer movies that I recognized as the most feminist, daring and influential of the pre-censorship period. I decided this was the basis for a book.

Erich Von Stroheim kisses the hand of a blonde woman in a scene from the film “L’Alibi” (1938), directed by Pierre Chenal.

Photo: John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images

But despite writing for a mass circulation newspaper, and despite the fact that Turner Classic Movies assured me it would make a documentary based on my book if it ever got published, it still took four and a half years before I got a contract to write “Complicated Women.”

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The French Had a Name for It ’24: Nov. 29-Dec. 3. $17.Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., S.F. 415-863-1087. www.roxie.com

Why this trip down memory lane? Because it’s why I know how Don Malcolm feels.

Don Malcolm is the impresario behind the Roxie Theater’s “The French Had a Name for It” festivals, which in the last 10 years has blown away all the mistaken orthodoxies surrounding film noir and French cinema. For years, Malcolm was the only person, possibly in the world, who knew that the French invented film noir and that they did it as well as the Americans, and probably better, because they didn’t have to contend with censorship.

So what did Malcolm do? He didn’t write a book (although he’s writing one now), because he knew it probably wouldn’t get published. Instead, he put on film festivals at the Roxie, using the festival form, not just to entertain (though he definitely did that), but to educate and to inform as well as to transform the stale, wrong ways that people think about noir.

Malcolm has had successful festivals every year since 2014, but his latest— “The French Had a Name for It, ’24”— is the motherlode. It includes 19 films, bringing back some of the greatest hits of the previous festivals, along with new discoveries. Among the latter is “Trap for Cinderella” (1965), which plays Sunday, Dec. 1, and stars the astonishing French-Vietnamese actress Dany Carel.

French actors Brigitte Bardot and Sami Frey on the set of “La Vérité,” written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

“Carel is one of the last living survivors of our French noir era, with appearances dating back to the mid-fifties,” said Malcolm, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. “(Director) AndreCayatte saw her potential, which led to their collaboration in ‘Trap for Cinderella,’ the last great psychological thriller of the era. She gives a fearless, incredibly wide-ranging performance in a triple role.”

Malcolm’s curation of these films is so good that, even if you know nothing about them, you can walk into any screening and feel assured you’re going to see something worth your time. These are generally not titles you can stream, and most you can’t buy, so the theater is your only option. And it appears that this edition of “The French Had a Name for It” may be the last, so this could be the last opportunity to discover these films for the foreseeable future.

“Film noir was invented in France,” said Malcolm, “and the films deserve an audience equal in size to what we see for American film noir. French film in the disparaged period prior to the New Wave is incredibly varied and accomplished. It deserves a lot more exposure to audiences than just what we’ve done for the past 10 years. Hopefully, its time is coming.”

Reach Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com

  • Mick LaSalle

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    Mick LaSalle

    Mick LaSalle is the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he has worked since 1985. He is the author of two books on pre-censorship Hollywood, "Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood" and "Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man." Both were books of the month on Turner Classic Movies and "Complicated Women" formed the basis of a TCM documentary in 2003, narrated by Jane Fonda. He has written introductions for a number of books, including Peter Cowie's "Joan Crawford: The Enduring Star" (2009). He was a panelist at the Berlin Film Festival and has served as a panelist for eight of the last ten years at the Venice Film Festival. His latest book, a study of women in French cinema, is "The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses."

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