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Up To Date

DVD Gurus: Film Noir

Beth Lipoff
/
KCUR

Beautiful women, crime and doomed lovers dominate the screen when it comes to film noir. At their height, these films featured star players, such as Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster and Marilyn Monroe.

On Friday's Up to Date, our DVD Gurus highlighted their favorites of the genre. We also talked with a few special guests from the Noir City film festival.

"I've always said that in film noir, it's where women in Hollywood were allowed to be, for once, completely the equal of men," said Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation. "By which I mean equally tempted, equally compromised and equally guilty."

In the 1950 film Gun Crazy, actress Peggy Cummins played a femme fatale, carnival sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr. Cummins told Up to Date host Steve Kraske that the film's appeal was "a part, a very good part."

She added, "I was blonde...I was small. And I played a lot of ingénues. I never got anything that I could get my teeth into like this part." 

Here's a list of the films they discussed:

  • Gun Crazy
  • Asphalt Jungle
  • The Prowler
  • Criss Cross
  • In A Lonely Place

Guests:

  • Mitch Brian, screenwriter, UMKC film professor and writer for 435 Magazine
  • Jason Heck, film critic
  • Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation
  • Peggy Cummins, star of 1950's Gun Crazy

HEAR MORE: The first Noir City Kansas City festival opens Nov. 14 and runs through Nov. 16 at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown. For more information, click here.  

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When I host Up To Date each morning at 9, my aim is to engage the community in conversations about the Kansas City area’s challenges, hopes and opportunities. I try to ask the questions that listeners want answered about the day’s most pressing issues and provide a place for residents to engage directly with newsmakers. Reach me at steve@kcur.org or on Twitter @stevekraske.
Laura Spencer is staff writer/editor at the Kansas City Public Library and a former arts reporter at KCUR.