The trim-muscled B-movie mastery of Samuel Fuller and the down-and-out pulp fiction fatalism of David Goodis intersect at the “Street of No Return,” Fuller’s 1989 adaptation of Goodis’ novel, which gets a belated Chicago premiere this weekend at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute.
Goodis’ bleak ’40s-’50s thrillers-one of which (“Down There”) was refashioned by Francois Truffaut into his 1960 classic “Shoot the Piano Player”-seem prime material for Fuller’s famous tabloid intensity. And it would be nice to report that this movie is a modern noir classic.
But it’s a little too cheap, too strange (shot in a Europe masquerading as racially torn America), too afflicted with synthesizers and dubbed European actors. Still, at 78, Fuller shows more energy, panache and chutzpah than most filmmakers half his age. And “Street”-with Keith Carradine as a pop star who gets his throat slashed, turns wino and gets revenge in an all-out gang war-is like all Fuller’s work. It never stops moving, never bores.
“Street” screens at the Film Center, Columbus Drive and Jackson Boulevard, at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 6 p.m. Sunday. Call 312-443-3733.
– The Film Center also starts two new series this week. Its Alan Rudolph retrospective leads off with Rudolph’s dreamy and sad 1976 debut, “Welcome to L.A.” (6 p.m. Saturday), and his highly inventive 1978 melodrama, “Remember My Name” (4:15 p.m. Sunday), with its unbeatable Alberta Hunter song score.
The superb “Japanese Ghost Stories” starts with two all-time classics: Kon Ichikawa’s 1963 “An Actor’s Revenge” (6 p.m. Friday) and Kenji Mizoguchi’s magnificent 1953 “Ugetsu” (6 p.m. Thursday).
“An Actor’s Revenge” is a pyrotechnic display of wit and style lavished on a story-an outlandish criss-crossing melodrama of backstage romance, intrigue, swordplay and betrayal-which was dated even in 1935, when it was first directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa with the same star, Kazuo Hasegawa, playing the same dual role of a female-impersonating kabuki star and a sly peasant thief. The story is near-nonsense, but Ichikawa stages it with such blazing originality and artifice that each scene leaps madly to life.
The Venice Grand Prize-winning “Ugetsu” (or “Ugetsu Monogatari”) is a supernatural romance of matchless poetry, lyricism and style. Directed by Mizoguchi, one of the screen’s masters of period sagas, tragic romance and the long moving-camera take, this great film takes two classic ghost tales by Akinara Ueda-both centering on a provincial potter who travels to the city in war-torn 16th Century Japan-and weaves them into a haunting and spellbinding moving tableau of beauty, mystery and pathos. The themes are the fragility and destructiveness of desire, the horror of war; they’ve rarely been more memorably expressed.
– Jacques Rivette’s 1974 “Celine and Julie Go Boating” (7 p.m. Monday through Thursday) at Facets, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave., is the most joyous film of a director more noted for his hermetic, byzantine portrayals of paranoia-ridden cities or self-destructing artistic endeavors. Its delightful cast-Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier-is matched by its continuous display of high intellectual whimsy, fairy-tale splendor and imagination. Call 312-281-4114.
– Movie classics always are better seen on the big screen than the VCR, and the 1939 David Selznick “Gone With the Wind” is no exception. Starting Friday, the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport Ave., will play a brand-new 35 mm print of the legendary super-melodrama, struck from the same materials as the restored 50th anniversary version. Call 312-871-6604.
