Skip to main content
This weekend, Elliot Lavine is bringing his long running I Wake Up Dreaming film festival to Portland for the first time. He recommends these classic, widely available films to get you primed for his week of double and triple features of classic and obscure film noir. Find them on Netflix and Amazon Prime or at Movie Madness, and get lost in the shadows.
Noted Manson victim and molester Roman Polanski's neo-noir classic serves as the perfect crossover introduction to traditional noir. "It's so dark, probably the most pessimistic film of the '70s," says Lavine. "It fused that fevered atmosphere of noir's classic period with the national sense of foreboding and mistrust, not all that different from 2017.
Starring Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, Lavine calls Jacques Tourneur's winding story of a private eye's attempt to escape to California to start a new life "one of the most beautifully atmospheric romantic noir films of the postwar period."
Orson Welles directs and co-stars as a brutal, washed-up police captain in this late-period noir now considered one of the best by the man behind Citizen Kane. Lavine calls it "a colossal film that will probably give the first-time viewer more than a casual appreciation of noir."