C&C 92: The Melody Lingers On

Noir City Seattle fades out, plus two movies I won’t forget for very different reasons

Now that the curtain is down on Noir City Seattle, I can admit that I felt nervous when I saw the program for this year’s film festival. The musical motif made for a terrifically broad range of titles, half of which I’d be introducing to the crowd at SIFF Cinema Downtown. I can hold forth on the noir bona fides of a movie indefinitely, but I’m on shakier ground when it comes to notes and measures. A few years of piano lessons did not prepare me to discourse on matters melodic. Many of this year’s movies highlighted jazz, and on that subject, as I said during my intro for Robert Altman’s Kansas City (1996), I’m an enthusiast, not an expert.

Fortunately, I had an expert to pester. My thanks to Ethan Iverson for his primer on the Kansas City sound in advance of the Altman screening, and for steering me to Kevin Whitehead’s Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film (2020). This erudite, breezily readable book provided a valuable framework for talking about movies as varied as the Jack Webb-directed Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955) and the festival finale, Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986), inspired in part by the relationship between expat pianist Bud Powell and his fan-turned-friend-turned-caretaker Francis Paudras.

With Rosemarie and the jacket Elvis would have wanted me to wear. Photo by Perla X. Caballero.

This year’s fest saw the best double-bill that Noir City maestro Eddie Muller has ever entrusted to me. Fully half the audience had never seen Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and knowing that their first experience of this scathing masterpiece would be on the big screen is why I turn my schedule upside down for a week. To introduce Elvis Presley’s Noir City debut with King Creole (1958), I dressed in a manner that did justice to the occasion. I saved my blue suede shoes for the following night, when I recounted the saga of how Elvis was almost cast as Robert Mitchum’s baby brother in Thunder Road (1958). I maintain that if Elvis had made those two films back-to-back, he wouldn’t have ended up in Las Vegas. And I got the crowd to boo Colonel Tom Parker on consecutive evenings, so my work was done.

It was also a treat to revisit Webb’s goofy Blues with an appreciative audience. The movie, set in 1927 Kansas City, is basically a musical episode of Dragnet in period costume—same voiceover, same flat cinematography, same deadpan sense of humor—and if that doesn’t sound like a good time then I can’t help you. I’m an unapologetic fan of Webb and his two-feet-firmly-planted style of storytelling. Peggy Lee deserved her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod as a dipsomaniacal singer pressed into a comeback, Andy Devine plays a surprisingly competent lawman, and backing everybody up on clarinet is Lee Marvin as the man least likely to take up the instrument.

My closing night shoes

Two days after Noir City ended, I was back at the theater for a meeting of SIFF members followed by a screening of one of my favorite musicals, The Band Wagon (1953), which we could have screened at this year’s festival given the climactic Mickey Spillane-inspired “Girl Hunt Ballet.” SIFF announced plans to “lean into” film projection in 2026, including bringing 35mm and 70mm back to the SIFF Cinema Downtown. There’s no timetable yet but doing so would mean that the kind of curios that didn’t make the Seattle fest could be in the cards for 2027.

What (Else) I’m Watching

Keeping the musical theme aloft, Sirāt (2025) is set amidst the subculture of ravers who orchestrate massive, days-long parties in the deserts of North Africa, erecting temporary walls of speakers alongside bluffs carved out over millennia. Luis arrives with son Esteban in tow, searching for his daughter, who has gone missing. As the global political situation collapses, Luis learns from some sympathetic misfit souls that another rave is happening deeper in the desert. Maybe his daughter is there.

And that’s all I’ll say. Even the trailer gives away too much. Sirāt is a shattering, transformative movie, one of the most remarkable experiences I’ve had in a theater. When it ended, the audience sat in dumbstruck silence. Rosemarie and I wandered home and didn’t speak for a good ten minutes. What appears to be a thriller in the most exotic of locales is something deeper and more existential. Sergi López, often cast as a heavy in films like With a Friend Like Harry … (2000), Dirty Pretty Things (2002), and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), is extraordinarily effective as Luis, a father focused on the one thing he thinks he can control as the world burns.

Directed and cowritten by Óliver Laxe and produced by Pedro Almodóvar, Sirāt won the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and has received Oscar nominations for Best International Feature and Best Sound. See it in as big a theater as you can knowing as little as possible beforehand. Pencil in some time to process it afterward.

And then there are movies that have no music to them at all. Sure, there’s a soundtrack, but what you’re watching has no melody, no lyricism, no rhythm. Just noise.

Please understand that this is not always a bad thing.

When Kino Lorber reissued Night of the Juggler (1980) last year, I took note of several reviews placing it in the company of gritty movies about the New York City of my childhood like Taxi Driver (1976), The Warriors (1979), and—be still my heart—The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). Compounding my interest was that this neglected film is based on a novel by William P. McGivern, who specialized in bad cop yarns frequently adapted into noirs like The Big Heat (1953) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).

I finally caught up with it. Juggler is no diamond in the rough. It’s Stupid High and Low (guy kidnaps the wrong kid) meets Dumb Death Wish (the city is a hellscape).

Again, please understand that this is not always a bad thing.

I cannot stress enough that Brolin, up top, is the HERO of this movie

Cliff Gorman plays a demented sad sack who decides to abduct the daughter of the real estate developer he blames for the demise of his South Bronx neighborhood. Trouble is there are not one but two moppets in the park that day sporting matching overalls and Jiffy-Pop perms that make them look like androgynous fugitives from a Sid & Marty Krofft Production. Hey, mistakes happen.

The girl Gorman grabs is the daughter of ex-cop James Brolin, whose Serpico-style history with the force complicates the case. I didn’t believe Brolin as a former member of the NYPD for one second. Not because of his performance, but because the California vibes he radiates are so intense he constantly comes off as a tourist. I kept waiting for him to stop mid-chase and ask how to get to the Statue of Liberty.

Speaking of chases, there’s a marathon one after the kidnapping that takes place on foot, in the subway, and in multiple commandeered vehicles including a taxi driven by Mandy Patinkin, who rants about “perverts” in an outrageous Latin accent with the confidence of an actor who knows he’ll nail the voice in The Princess Bride (1987) and be beloved forever. Brolin’s brat runs hand in hand with Gorman instead of going limp or yelling that she’s being abducted; for a cop’s daughter who insists that she doesn’t want to live with Mom in Connecticut, she’s the least streetwise kid in the history of New York movies.

Juggler truly jumps the rails when Dan Hedaya turns up as a detective whose life was torpedoed by Brolin’s testimony; one wild-eyed look from him and you instantly know he’s more of a threat than Gorman, who only becomes more pathetic as the film goes on. That said, I still didn’t think Hedaya’s character would empty a fucking shotgun at Brolin on a crowded daytime street in Manhattan. Also, what New York cop worth his salt bagel would dispatch units to “the 42^nd Street porno district,” as Hedaya does?

Also in this film:

• A peep show interrogation in the heart of the aforementioned 42^nd Street porno district so bonkers that I alerted my friend Christa Faust to its existence at once;

• Industrial-strength servings of casual racism and homophobia;

• The Godfather’s Richard Castellano delivering the best performance as a hotheaded lieutenant, which is almost undermined by a “humanizing” detail—he’s always on the phone with his wife planning their son’s wedding!—beaten into the cold, cold ground.

What Juggler has going for it is gonzo energy and tremendous location shooting in the shithole New York I remember. It’s not the last ‘70s movie, as some partisans have claimed. It’s more like the first ‘80s movie, a crude precursor of the shoot-‘em-ups that Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and others would be cranking out at decade’s end.

Anyway, it’s on Kanopy, and I’d definitely watch it again.