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So, what is film noir? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop? The world may never know on both counts, but there are certainly several legitimate postulations for the former. Film still from THIS GUN FOR HIRE, our NOIR CITY '17 opening night film. Film noir, translating to “black film” in French, was a term bestowed retroactively to features generally referred to as melodramas or crime dramas at the time of their production; at first, the moniker was usually reserved for American titles that fit the bill made after World War II. Coined in Nino Frank’s 1946 essay and explored in depth by French critics Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton in their 1955 work   Panorama du film noir américain   1941–1953 ( A Panorama of American Film Noir ) the label has, in the ensuring six decades, been alternatively referred to as a genre, style, cycle, period, mood and so on. Certainly, some of these identifiers hold more water than others, but overall, film no...

When film historian/author Joseph McBride was writing his book on Howard Hawks, Hawks on Hawks , he asked the famed filmmaker about working with Robert Mitchum in 1967’s western El Dorado . McBride recalled telling Hawks: “Mitchum is extraordinarily good in El Dorado , but he tends to be a sort of lazy actor, doesn’t he, if you don’t push him?” Hawks wasn’t sure, noting that “When the picture was half over, I said [to Mitchum], 'you know you’re the biggest fraud I’ve ever met in all my life…you pretend you don’t care a damn thing about a scene, and you’re the hardest-working so-and-so I’ve ever known.'" Mitchum’s response to Hawks? “Don’t tell anybody.” The Aero Theatre is celebrating the 100th birthday of the slow-eyed, barrel-chested tough guy with a five-movie festival “ Tough Guys Finish First: A Robert Mitchum Centennial ." The retrospective kicks off Friday with David Lean’s 1970 romantic epic Ryan's Daughter,  in which Mitchum plays against type as a meek I...