Noir City Festival Returns With 20-Film Music Lineup
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- Noir City festival returns to Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre April 3-5 and 5-12 with 'Face the Music! 20 Tales of Music, Mayhem, and… Murder!' — its 28th year under the American Cinematheque since 1999.
- Eddie Muller and Alan K. Rode curated a lineup functioning as a de facto jazz film festival, featuring titles like 'Young Man With a Horn,' 'The Man With the Golden Arm,' and appearances by Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins, plus Pat Boone as a guest for 'The Yellow Canary.'
- Rode identifies Alex North's score for 'A Streetcar Named Desire' as the watershed moment for jazz's transition from underworld symbol in 1940s noir to legitimized film score, while Muller credits Otto Preminger with embracing jazz as propulsion rather than a dark signifier.
- The festival's music-centric films double as meditations on race and economic precarity, with Muller citing 'A Man Called Adam' (Sammy Davis Jr.) as confronting the question of whether an artist can survive financially in a money-first culture.
- The opening night pairs the obscure 1941 Warner Bros. film 'Blues in the Night' — featuring Elia Kazan in a supporting role and Don Siegel's montage sequences, imported as a 35mm print from England — alongside the Cornell Woolrich adaptation 'Black Angel.'
- The festival has cultivated a new generation, with Muller noting that two-thirds of recent audiences for canonical noir like 'Out of the Past' and 'The Killing' raised their hands as first-time viewers — a demographic shift he's now working to convert at TCM.
Why it matters: Twenty-eight years in, Noir City remains a working model for repertory cinema's survival: its two-thirds first-viewer rate for canonical titles like 'Out of the Past' proves a younger audience exists for restored classics, while the music theme positions jazz itself as a noir protagonist whose on-screen role evolved from underworld shorthand (1940s) to Oscar-grade score (1950s). For working musicians, Muller's framing — that every film raises the question of whether art can sustain a living — gives the lineup a contemporary resonance beyond nostalgia.
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