BEWARE OF THIS ‘DAME’
‘Out of the Past” is in your future. Jacques Tourneur’s twisty, moody 1947 noir unreels tomorrow and Friday, thanks to MoMA Film at the Gramercy.
Robert Mitchum (in a role originally meant for Bogart) is Jeff Bailey, a former New York private eye living the quiet life in small-town California while trying to escape the past.
But the past catches up with him, as it usually does in the dark world of film noir.
Bailey’s particular demons are embodied by Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer), a two-faced “dame in a million,” and Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), a none-too-pleasant gangster.
They’re nothing but trouble.
Virginia Huston plays Bailey’s California girlfriend and Dickie Moore portrays the deaf-mute kid who works with him at the local gas station.
“Out of the Past” is one of 10 films in a series to promote the paperback edition of James Harvey’s “Movie Love in the Fifties” (Da Capo Press).
Also screening: Otto Preminger’s “Angel Face” (1952), Douglas Sirk’s “All I Desire” (1953), Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (1953) and Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” (1958).
The series unfolds through June 2 at the Gramercy, 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue; http://www.moma.org.
* Having grown up in the suburbs, Cine File knows how desperate life there can be.
But nothing he experienced comes anywhere near the ugly events in the two films that make up the “Suburban Nightmare” program at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater Wednesday through June 10.
Leonard Kastle’s “The Honeymoon Killers” (1970) is based on a real-life couple (played by Shirley Stoler and Tony LoBianco) who in the late 1940s went on a bloody spree, seducing and killing suburban spinsters to get their life savings.
Frank Perry’s “The Swimmer” (1968), based on a John Cheever short story, stars Burt Lancaster as a suburbanite who makes his way home by swimming through neighbors’ pools. The finale will shock you.
The Pioneer is at Avenue A and Third Street in the East Village; (212) 254-3300. Yummy pizza, too.
* Zanzibar was the name of an informal group of radical filmmakers that developed in Paris after the political turmoil of May 1968.
Wednesday through June 8, Anthology Film Archives (Second Avenue and Second Street) will offer 10 Zanzibar flicks.
They include Philippe Garrel’s “The Virgin’s Bed” (1969), Eric Rohmer’s “La Collectionneuse” (1966) and Jackie Reynal’s “Deux Fois” (1968).
Reynal is best known to New Yorkers as the woman behind the beloved old Bleecker Street Cinema. In the 1960s, she was one of the youngest film editors in France.
Challenged to make a film of her own, she traveled to Barcelona, where she shot “Deux Fois” in just a week.
Details: (212) 505-5181.

