Dueling Divas and Second Dark Age

The Castro Theater is currently in the middle of two multi-week programs.

On Tuesdays, they are presenting the Second Dark Age, which is a postmodern film noir retrospective. It runs February 26 to April 8 (March 25 excluded). On Wednesdays, they are showing Dueling Divas, which is a double bill of two female movie stars mostly from Hollywood's Golden Age - West, Harlow, Dietrich, Bankhead, Turner, Hayworth, Crawford, Hayward, Taylor, and Moreau. Divas runs from February 27 to April 9 (excluding March 19 & 26).

To date, I've caught all the films from both series with the exception of Lady from Shanghai with Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. I saw that at the Lark Theater in Larkspur a few years ago. Dueling Divas takes this week off but I'll have to miss this week's Dark Age films because I have tickets to two films at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival on Tuesday. That's too bad because noir films look interesting & I had not heard of them before - The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) with Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle and 1974's The Nickel Ride. They have been showing the original theater previews for the Dark Age films and I wasn't familiar with either film previously. Both films are about small-time, shady, losers that reach the end of the line.

Second Dark Age
Night Moves with Gene Hackman & Melanie Griffith; (1975)
Blow-Out directed by Brian De Palma, with John Travolta; (1981)
Cutter's Way with Jeff Bridges & John Heard; (1981)
Rolling Thunder with William Devane & Tommy Lee Jones, written by Paul Schrader; (1977)
The Driver directed by Walter Hill with Ryan O'Neal and Bruce Dern; (1978)
Thief directed by Michael Mann with James Caan; (1981)

Dueling Divas
She Done Him Wrong with Mae West & Cary Grant; (1933)
Libeled Lady with Spencer Tracy, Jean Harlow, William Powell, & Myrna Loy; (1936)
Scarlet Empress with Marlene Dietrich, directed by Josef von Sternberg; (1934)
A Royal Scandal with Tallulah Bankhead & Anne Baxter, directed by Ernst Lubitsch (dropped out due to illness) & Otto Preminger; (1945)
The Postman Always Rings Twice with Lana Turner & John Garfield; (1946)