As always, the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs — taking place this Thursday through Sunday — will focus on movies from the primary noir era of the ’40s and ’50s, including a handful of films that have not been screened theatrically in several decades. Also as always, the 2025 edition of the desert fest will reserve a spot for a touch of neo-noir, as seen with the inclusion this time of the 1970s crime thriller “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.”
This year, though, the festival will include a truly neo-neo noir. To close out the gathering Sunday night, director Guillermo Del Toro and co-screenwriter Kim Morgan will be coming to Palm Springs with an apparently never-before-seen extended cut of their 2021 film “Nightmare Alley,” presented in black-and-white, a la nearly every one of the 12 vintage films that will be preceding this newbie over the weekend.
“I know Guillermo’s very excited about this,” says longtime festival director Alan K. Rode. “He and Kim are nice enough to come out and spend some time introducing the film and watching it. I’m honored that he’s coming out to do this, and I’m really looking forward to introducing his black-and-white extended cut from one of our most honored filmmakers. He’s treating it kind of as a premiere, which is very exciting.”
Del Toro’s remake of the classic 1947 “Nightmare Alley” was released in color four years ago, of course, followed by a brief run of a black-and-white version that appeared in select theaters and then on Hulu before being put back in the vault. But the filmmaker announced in December in a Bluesky social-media post that he was working on a new B&W edit. “I am remastering the B&W Nightmare Alley w/ an extended cut. Stay tuned,” the filmmaker posted on the app on Dec. 3, alerting his fans to the existence of the expanded version that the audience in Palm Springs will presumably see.
But hardcore noir buffs may be just as excited about some of the titles that might as well be considered premieres, they’ve been out of public view for so long. “Swell Guy” (1946) will be seen in a newly made 35mm print and is being screened theatrically on Friday afternoon for the first time anywhere in decades, Rode says. The same gap between theatrical screenings is true of “Paid in Full” (1950), playing on Friday night, although in this case, it’s a brand new digital print from Paramount that will be having an official premiere at the festival. On Saturday morning, “Unmasked” will be getting its own digital theatrical premiere, completing the roundup of newly revived obscurities.
If these selections make it sound like the Arthur Lyons Film Festival is not a roundup of the usual noir suspects, that’s by design. Although noir novices are as likely to enjoy the programming as much as anyone, Rode figures that the loyal audience that returns to the Palm Springs Cultural Center (formerly the Camelot Theatres) every Mother’s Day weekend has already seen “Double Indemnity” and “The Big Sleep” and wants to experience titles from the darker corners (so to speak) of the noir vault. (Scroll down to see the full lineup of films.)
Says Rode, “I’m keeping with the tradition of not showing the same film in 18 years,” which is how long it’s been since he took over programming the festival, which began in 2000. “That’s kind of an unconscious thing, but film noir is kind of the gift that keeps on giving,” with many hundreds of titles that firmly or loosely fit within the genre, to the extent that noir can truly be considered one. This emphasis on lesser-screened films doesn’t mean that Rode doesn’t still program movies that are widely considered classics by noir buffs, that he just hasn’t gotten around to in Palm Springs yet. An example of that would be “Act of Violence,” the Fred Zinneman film that shows Sunday afternoon; that one has shown more than once at Noir City, the festival that he and Eddie Muller co-host at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, but it will finally be unspooling in the desert this year.
Muller, who is one of Rode’s partners in the Film Noir Foundation, and of course a TCM host, will be joining Rode once again in Palm Springs to introduce a handful of films he’s partial to. One of those is “Johnny O’Clock,” which will be shown on Friday afternoon. That screening will be preceded by a book signing Muller will do for a newly revised classic of his own, “Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir,” with Hollywood’s venerable Larry Edmunds Bookshop out to handle book sales.
Sadly, the original stars of these films who came out to Palm Springs to speak in the festival’s early years have mostly passed on, but Rode has made a point of having family members out for introductions or Q&As. That’ll be the case in a couple of instances this year, first on opening night Thursday, with Rory Flynn, daughter of Errol Flynn, out to talk about “Cry Wolf” (1947), in which the actor co-starred with Barbara Stanwyck. Then on Saturday night, Wyatt McCrea, the grandson of Joel McCrea, will be on hand to talk about his grandfather’s career, including his work as the star of “The Unseen” (1945).
“Cry Wolf,” showing at Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs
Individual tickets for the screenings at the Palm Springs Cultural Center are $16.29 (including a $1.79 processing fee). There is one exception: “Nightmare Alley” tickets on closing night are $32.65 (including a $2.64 fee). A full-access pass for the entire 13-film lineup is available for $158.19. That festival pass does not include admission to “Nightmare Alley,” but passholders are able to buy a ticket for that film at half-price. Advance tickets for all the individual films or festival pass are on sale through Eventbrite here.
Scanning the list of titles playing this year — which can be browsed in detail here — one may stand out as not just the most famous film being screened, but an outlier: “On the Waterfront.” Rode readily acknowledges it’s not an exact fit. “I know purists will argue with me whether this is film noir or not — and I don’t think it really is,” he admits. “But it’s one of the great films ever made in Hollywood. And it put me on the path to righteousness, via an elective film course I took in 1970 during my junior year in high school in New Jersey. It’s a film that meant a lot to me, and I thought it would be great to show it on the big screen, so that’s what I’m doing. And I have a couple stories to share, courtesy of Nehemiah Persoff, who made his film debut driving the taxi that Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando were in making the famous ‘I could have been a contender’ scene. That was also the debut movie of such actors as Pat Henning, Martin Balsam, Fred Gwynn and Nehemiah, who all went on to great careers as character actors” in and out of noir.
There are other films that might be seen as outside of film noir which Rode will make a case for, like the Western “Lust for Gold,” starring Ida Lupino and Glenn Ford. (Rode knows his noir Westerns, as scant as that subgenre may be; he literally wrote the book on another one of them, “Blood on the Moon.”) “None of the characters in ‘Lust for Gold’ are nice,” he laughs to point out, which helps firm up its noir credentials.
“Lust for Gold,” showing at Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs
Also crossing genres a bit is “The Unseen,” “another film that hasn’t been seen in decades, and this was like a follow-up to the more well-known movie ‘The Uninvited,’ the ghost story that Louis Allen made with Ray Milland and Gail Russell. ‘The Unseen’ is more of a kind of noir-stained murder mystery, with McCrea and Russell again starring and Allen again directing. Wyatt McCrea is a super good guy who I’ve become friendly with, and he’ll be there to talk about his grandfather and the McCrea Ranch Foundation.”
Rode is excited about “Swell Guy,” “a forgotten movie that (producer) Mark Hellinger made in between his big hit of ‘The Killers’ and ‘Brute Force’ that has been completely forgotten and overlooked. I was really fortunate that Universal cleared up some rights issues on it, and we’re showing what I’m told is a pristine 35mm print of a most unusual movie, written by Richard Brooks… The film is about a Hemingway-esque war correspondent who’s supposed to be a great hero, who comes back to his hometown after the war, and it turns out he’s a total miscreant shit. And who better to play that than Sonny Tufts, of all people? And he gets involved with Ann Blythe. It’s a very, very odd and interesting movie.”
“Paid in Full,” meanwhile, “has been missing for many, many years, and I really have to thank Charlotte Barker, who’s the head archivist at Paramount. She made me DCPs of ‘Paid in Full’ and also a Republic programmer, ‘Unmasked,’ with Raymond Burr running a scandal sheet, blackmailing and stealing and murdering his way into various mayhem. Those two films have not been shown in I don’t know how long.”
But the main attraction of the week for most may still be “Nightmare Alley.” Del Toro will be making his first appearance at the festival, although Morgan was a familiar face there in earlier years. “She interviewed Julie Garfield back in 2010 and has been to the festival several times; I’ve known Kim for years and I think we did a commentary track on a ‘New York Confidential’ DVD years ago.” As for the director, “The term genius is very often tossed around and maybe misused when it comes to people involved in cinema, but as far as I’m concerned, Guillermo is as close to a genius as we have,” Rode says. “He can do anything from makeup to drawing to writing, directing and producing, but he’s also got so much humility and so much passion, and it’s all genuine. Just sitting and listening to him talk… He did a thing with the head of the British Film Institute during the TCM Classic Film Festival and he was talking about what the Powell and Pressburger movies meant to British Cinema, and cinema generally, and it was just so eloquent and spot-on… and he’s such a good person.
“I have to kind of pinch myself, because this is 26 years that this event has gone on. If memory serves, the first year that I was involved in this was 2002, and I was sitting in one of what was then called the Camelot Theaters, watching ‘Nightmare Alley’ with (star) Colleen Gray, who I became friends with. And I believe Eddie Muller was introducing it, and Linda Christian, Tyrone Power’s widow, the actress, walked in and sat down in the theater. So now here we are, 23 years later, and we’re showing Del Toro’s version of William Lindsay Gresham’s book, and it feels like we’ve really come full circle.”
The audience at the Cultural Center leans toward the older and the long-term-loyal, not surprisingly, given the local population. But that’s not true of every film noir festival. When Noir City took place at the Egyptian in Hollywood in March, the audience skewed young. In a rare example of that festival screening the most obvious classics, they put up a double-bill of “Out of the Past” and Stanley Kubruck’s “The Killing,” hosted by Muller and Rode, who each asked for a show of hands of who hadn’t seen the film in question before. “
The audience at the Cultural Center leans toward the older and the long-term-loyal, not surprisingly, given the local population. But that’s not true of every film noir festival. When Noir City took place at the Egyptian in Hollywood in March, the audience skewed young. In a rare example of that festival screening the most obvious classics, they put up a double-bill of “Out of the Past” and Stanley Kubruck’s “The Killing,” hosted by Muller and Rode, who each asked for a show of hands of who hadn’t seen the film in question before. “I expected maybe six to 10 people to raise their hands, but I’d say about two-thirds of the audience for each film did, which was shocking. I’ve been doing this a long time, and you start getting these assumptions that, ‘Well, everybody has seen this,’ but we’re into another generation or so of audiences for these films.”
Why they appeal to the very young as well as the very old is clear to Rode. “The reason these films are really kind of a connective, umbilical to classic films for a modern audience is because the themes are timeless… I mean, even though someone who’s in their early twenties may be confused over: ‘Why are the men wearing these hats? Why is a doctor in a maternity ward smoking a cigarette? Why do the phones look like boomerangs?’ But the basic themes of the human condition and the themes of striving, lust, larceny, greed, all of that… our accoutrements in the modern world have changed significantly from, say, 1947, but I don’t think people have changed that much.”
When it comes to definitions, “I don’t think it’s a genre. I think it’s a style,” Rode says, “and I think, like beauty, noir is often in the eye of the beholder.” But there are obvious near-common denominators. Clearly not every crime film from that period is a film noir, but there’s an argument that’s been made that every film noir is a crime film in some way. Does that hold true?
Rode wouldn’t necessarily go that far, but he notes, “You can say that one of the things that characterizes a film noir is when people are involved in doing something that they know is wrong — either legally, morally, culturally or whatever — and then they do it anyway. That’s one of the strong characteristics of a film noir. Or as Arthur Lyons put it, ‘You can always tell it’s a film noir when the protagonist gets screwed over in the first five minutes and it goes downhill from there.’”
The full program for the 2025 Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival:
Thursday, May 8
• 7:30 p.m.: “Cry Wolf” (1947) with Errol Flynn, Barbara Stanwyck [followed by Rory Flynn Q&A]
Friday, May 9
• 10 a.m.: “Swell Guy” (1946) with Sonny Tufts, Ann Blyth, Ruth Warwick
• 1 p.m.: “Johnny O’Clock” (1947) with Dick Powell, Evelyn Keyes, Lee J. Cobb [preceded by Eddie Muller book signing]
• 4 p.m.: “Lust for Gold” (1949) with Ida Lupino, Glenn Ford
• 7:30 p.m.: “Paid in Full” (1950) with Robert Cummings, Lizabeth Scott, Eve Arden
Saturday, May 10
• 10 a.m.: “Unmasked” (1950) with Robert Rockwell, Barbra Fuller, Raymond Burr
• 1 p.m.: “Angel Face” (1953) with Robert Mitchum, Jean Simmons
• 4 p.m.: “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973) with Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle
• 7:30 p.m.: “The Unseen” (1945) with Joel McCrea, Gail Russell [with appearance by Wyatt McCrea]
Sunday, May 11
• 10 a.m.: “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” (1950) with James Cagney, Barbara Payton and Helena Carter
• 1 p.m.: “Act of Violence” (1948) withVan Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor
• 4 p.m.: “On the Waterfront” (1954) with Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Pat Henning and Eva Marie Saint
• 7 p.m.: “Nightmare Alley” (2021) with Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette [with Q&A with Guillermo Del Toro, Kim Morgan] (separate admission)
