• Abby Mann (1927-2008) - Oscar-winning screenwriter of Judgment of Nuremberg. He was also nominated for writing Stanley Kramer's Ship of Fools. He also worked on Vittorio De Sica's The Condemned of Altona, wrote John Cassavetes' A Child is Waiting and Gordon Douglas' The Detective, which starred Frank Sinatra, and created the TV series Kojak. He also appears in the documentary Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust. He died of heart failure March 25, in Beverly Hills. (Variety)

• Art Aragon (1927-2008) - Professional boxer-turned-actor who appears as himself in the Bob Hope comedy Off Limits and in Kur Neumann's film-noir The Ring. He also appears in John Huston's boxing picture Fat City and in the WWII film To Hell and Back. He died of complications from a stroke March 25, in Northridge, California. (NY Times)
• Paul Arthur (c.1948-2008) - Film historian, scholar and critic who taught English and film studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. He was known for his writings on avant-garde and documentary cinemas and had made a number of short films, himself. He died of melanoma March 25, in White Plains, New York. (NY Times)

Last Thursday saw the curtain close on Film Forum's six-week long festival of bullets and broads. Some 70 film noir undercards, mostly from the genre's heyday of the 40s and 50s, were screened in all their black and white glory. Judging by the near sell-out crowds on most of the nights I attended, the fest was a huge success. (There were reportedly some die-hard noir aficionados who took in every single film) The biggest discovery of the fest was The Sleeping City, a surgically sharp little thriller about a supposedly clean and tidy city hospital that has a river of black noir sludge running beneath it. Starring noir staples Richard Conte and Coleen Gray, it proved to be a runaway audience favorite. Another winner was 1954's Pushover, with Kim Novak in her debut role as a frosty blonde moll who Fred MacMurray salivates over like sexual flubber. A little chase film called Woman on the Run that uses the streets of San Francisco to great effect also gained many new fans. I'd happily cough up for a DVD edition of any of these titles.

As a movie theater, Film Forum has positive attributes (better movie screens than the IFC, a hot chick who mans the popcorn machine) and negative ones (no drink holders on the seats, a pacifist philosophy with regards to cell-phone abusers, [Not to mention major issues with temperature control -- why is it ALWAYS freezing in there? -Ed.]) but for a festival like this, it's a perfect venue. And who says this needs to be an isolated event? There's a whole universe of B-grade film noir out there. On the other hand, if the powers that be want to continue the B-festival vibe but take it in a different direction, I suggest that a B-Western festival would hit the spot. Shalako, anyone?

For those who missed Cinematical's periodic coverage of the fest, here is your comprehensive link list to our reviews: Thunder Road; The Lineup; Murder by Contract; Phantom Lady; The Sleeping City; Woman on the Run; The Suspect; Pushover; The Brothers Rico.

As a fan, I'm more or less willing to sit through anything starring Richard Conte. You can count me among those who don't think it would have been a tragedy if Francis Ford Coppola had given Conte the title role in The Godfather, as he supposedly considered doing before relegating him to the role of Barzini. Conte still came away with one of the film's best lines: "After all....we are not communists!" That said, he made a lot of forgettable films during his long career, film noir and otherwise. The Brothers Rico, screened at the recently concluded Film Forum B-noir festival, is unfortunately one of those films. It clocks in at around 90 minutes but feels twice as long, thanks to unfocused direction, lazy editing and a strange aversion to action. Whenever the story builds up to a moment where blood is about to be spilled, director Phil Karlson (Scandal Sheet, Kansas City Confidential) curiously leapfrogs over that moment and lands us in another long scene of tedious conversation. The movie leaves almost everything to the imagination, which movies should never do unless they're on very firm ground. I guess we should just assume there's a director's cut out there somewhere that contains all the movie's most promising scenes, such as the hotel room torture session, the driveway execution, and the presumed murder of a mobster's wife and child.

"More frightening than romantic. That's what love is when you're young, and what life is when you're old." That's the kind of dialogue you might expect to hear in a slow-burning Ingrid Bergman weepy or the like, but it's actually a snippet from Woman on the Run, a noir thriller that moves at neck-breaker pace from beginning to end and barely stops long enough for people to exchange first names. The woman of the title finds herself in the position of needing to avoid both the cops and a killer, and to do that means staying mobile on the hilly streets of San Francisco and out-maneuvering everyone in her rear-view mirror. Helmed by Orson Wells collaborator Norman Foster, this film knows how to run and talk at the same time, which gives it a real-time quality not especially common in the noir genre. By the time the film hurls us into a high-velocity finish on a beachfront midway, we've got a surprisingly good bead on the characters and what makes them tick. We also need a whiplash exam. Even when everything finally stops moving, at the climax, there's a palpable vibration. The characters stand there, trembling from the force of a rickety wooden roller-coaster screaming over their heads, and the dialogue takes on an added layer of tension, as if the whole situation could splinter and fly apart at any moment.

An emergency room doctor steps outside the hospital to have a smoke before beginning his morning rounds. As he takes in the air, approaching footsteps are heard. He turns his head in time to see a gun pushed into his face at point-blank range and fired. Who would perform such a risky hit in broad daylight, and why? Is it mob-connected? Is there a maniac on the loose? Thanks to some basic medical training in his past, Detective Rowan (Richard Conte) is chosen by the NYPD homicide squad to get to the bottom of the case by going undercover as a medical intern at the hospital in question. That's the set-up for The Sleeping City, a tight little noir film recently screened during Film Forum's B-Noir festival. Among its credits are a lean, focused script, an appropriately creepy and sometimes hilarious villain, and noir favorite Coleen Gray, an actress with a face like a baby eagle who you never think will turn out to be rotten but sometimes does. An added bonus of The Sleeping City is that it holds our attention by offering a panoramic view of old New York, with its working automats, less than fully-erect skyline, and omnipresent smokers who don't know they will be the subject of smug giggles from a future audience of their fellow New Yorkers.

"Introducing Kim Novak." What else do you need to know? After a short stint as "Miss Deepfreeze," a spokeswoman-character for a refrigerator company, the 21-year old aspiring actress and future Vertigo ice goddess was snatched up by Harry Cohn and immediately plunked down in a starring role in 1954's Pushover. The film, which was screened last week as part of Film Forum's ongoing B-Noir festival, is best described as a re-imagining of the popular Double Indemnity story. In the original, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck conspired to defraud an insurance company. Their ace in the hole was that MacMurray was an insurance man himself, and thought he could game the system. In Pushover, MacMurray and Novak conspire to double-cross a thief who's just knocked over a bank. Their ace in the hole is that MacMurray is a bank robbery detective, and thinks he can game the system. Novak plays the bank robber's girlfriend, tucked away in a posh apartment and waiting patiently for her man to breeze back into town. MacMurray and his partner Rick (Phil Carey) watch her every move from a stakeout nest in a motel across the street. Rick is initially skeptical that the bank robber would take the chance of coming back into town with all that money, just to pick up his girlfriend. Then he raises his binoculars and looks across the way at Novak for the first time: "Yep, he'll show up."

Cruelty is a necessary element of film noir, but it usually comes in the ending -- the last-minute reveal that he never really loved her or that she was only out for money, or that the wrong man will go down for the crime after all, because the system just doesn't care. The interesting thing about The Suspect is that cruelty is woven into the premise -- it paints the wholly improbable scenario of having a twenty-something secretary with the drop-dead movie star looks of Ella Raines (see above) fall in love with her boss, Charles Laughton. Yes, that Charles Laughton. Stop laughing, I'm serious. Laughton's character can hardly believe his good luck, and decides not to bother Ella Raines with the factoid that he has a wife at home. After what we can surmise has been a life of endless toil and trouble, he's not about to mess up this good thing that has fallen into his lap. The scenes where Laughton returns home from a hard day's work to be confronted by his shrieking horror of a wife (Rosalind Ivan) are entirely redundant -- the audience has already forgiven him for adultery, and is ready to forgive him for murder as well. In fact, we want him to murder his wife.

Beginning this past weekend and continuing through June 15, Manhattan's Film Forum (the last theater in North America with no drink holders on the seats) is hosting a six week mini-festival of films they deem 'B Noir.' Cinematical's own Martha Fischer and myself will be dropping in here and there and reviewing some of the grab-bag selections of the fest, which include psycho-drama noir, Japanese-American noir, caper-gone-wrong noir, and my personal favorite, Abraham Lincoln noir. While a few household-name films have been slipped into the mix -- including D.O.A., The Big Combo, and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing -- don't expect to see Fred MacMurray getting off the trolley car or Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum blowing smoke in each others' faces. That would ruin the hip 'B' angle Film Forum has gone to the trouble of cooking up. Which, mind you, is in no way a complaint: From a quick glance at the selections, the series promises wheelchair-bound contract killers, amnesia victims on the run from nameless crime syndicates, little girls used as human shields, and skeletons washing up on the beach.

Some expected highlights of the fest include the screening of a new print of Pushover, with Kim Novak in an early role as a cold-blooded moll, a screening of Don Siegel's The Lineup, which follows a pair of killers who enjoy writing down their victims' final words in a little book for kicks, and Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, with Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino as a tortured cop and a blind woman who may hold the clues to a grisly murder. There's also Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady, starring Alan Curtis as a man whose only hope of slipping the noose for the murder of his wife is to track down his alibi -- the dizzy dame he was romancing at a local dive at the time of the crime.

Admission is ten bucks for two films.