Get Out Tuesday: Noir Double-Feature @ SIFF

Tonight's show deserves special attention because Reign of Terror is, to our knowledge, the only noir film set during the French revolution. NoirFan62 says:

The great Anthony Mann takes a film that would probably play mostly as a colorful, sweeping, epic piece dealing with the French revolution and turns it, with the help of cinematographer John Alton, into a dark, shadowy and claustrophobic film noir/adventure/spy/suspense tale period piece featuring excellent performances from a cast that includes Robert Cummings, Richard Basehart and Arlene Dahl.

We especially like that a guy named Richard Basehart plays Robespierre, who's threatening to turn France into a dictatorship -- unless his little black book betrays him.

It's on the bill with Border Incident (1949), another Mann/Alton collaboration that strays from the strictly urban noir setting. An exposé of illegal aliens working farms on the Texas-Mexico border, it's an "intense and surprisingly violent docu-drama," written by crime specialist John C. Higgins. 1949! If only they'd started building that big fence then, imagine all the trouble we'd have been spared. Or not. Cue the Blogcritics review:

We all remember the debate over illegal immigration which exploded in political forums this summer, one of the more controversial solutions to which was to create a forced labor camp in which illegals from Mexico would erect a wall between the two countries; Border Incident, in its simplest form, is a story of why that wall wouldn't work.

Surprisingly progressive in its ideological perspective, the movie depicts a Mexican Policia Judicial Federal officer (the authentically Mexican Ricardo Montalban) and a U.S. Department of Immigration inspector (George Murphy, notably given lower billing than his non-white costar) who team up to halt the trafficking of Mexican braceros, or farm workers, into the clutches of unscrupulous American employers.

7pm // SIFF Cinema, McCaw Hall // Tickets $10