Pierre Chenal's 1939 Adaptation of James M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice"

SAN FRANCISCO'S 3RD FRENCH FILM NOIR FESTIVAL COMES TO THE ROXIE THEATER

From Thursday, November 3, through Monday, November 7, San Francisco's Roxie Theater will host the city's third annual French film noir festival, The French Had a Name For It 3. Fifteen films are set to screen, and opening night will showcase two from 1939, Marcel Carné's celebrated Le jour se lève (Daybreak), cited by many as the bridge film between poetic realism and noir, and Pierre Chenal's Le dernier tournant (The Last Turn), the much-anticipated, rarely seen first film adaptation of James M. Cain's searing crime novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Stanley Kubrick's "2001" - A Musical Odyssey, Pt. 2

The skies opened up over San Francisco on Saturday evening, October 15, and the rains poured down. Though this deluge complicated our trek from dinner at Alta restaurant on Market Street to Davies Symphony Hall on Grove, drenching weather was not so discouraging that it prevented a full house audience from attending the week's final screening of Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus performing its score live.

STANLEY KUBRICK'S "2001" - A MUSICAL ODYSSEY, Pt. 1

 

In 1964 Stanley Kubrick, who had by this time directed several notable and some Oscar-nominated films (Killer's Kiss, The Killing, Paths of Glory, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove) as well as one multiple-Academy-Award-winner (Spartacus), was now diving deep into science fiction. He'd become interested making a film about extraterrestrial life and was reading the work of top genre writers in search of a source novel that he could adapt. A knowledgeable acquaintance pointed him in the direction of Arthur C. Clark and though Clarke hadn't yet worked in film or had any of his novels adapted - and was wary - he was persuaded to collaborate by the dynamic and visionary Kubrick. Together the two would devise the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Clarke would concurrently write a novel of the same name.