Music and All That Jazz at This Year’s Noir City Film Festival

Treachery and deceit swirl all around us. Every awards season, it seems, there’s an Oscar given to the right person, but for the wrong film. Sometimes it’s an actor (Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman), sometimes it’s a director (Martin Scorcese for The Departed).

And sometimes it’s a singer.

If you see any movie at this year’s Noir City festival, running Jan. 16–25 at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre, make it The Man With the Golden Arm, starring Frank Sinatra. At the time a skinny crooner who’d just won Best Supporting Actor for From Here to Eternity, Ol’ Blue Eyes turns in his actual greatest-ever acting performance as a jazz drummer desperately trying — with girlfriend Kim Novak — to kick his debilitating heroin addiction.

Screening in a double feature at Noir City with The Sweet Smell of Success (from the bygone age of 1957, when critics actually held power over performing artists’ fortunes), The Man With the Golden Arm, with its pulsing, blaring jazz music by Elmer Bernstein, marked a sea change in film scores.

Eddie Muller knows the cliché all too well of a black-and-white noir movie from the 1940s, with its “a lonesome wailing saxophone.”

Except that brass instruments were hardly used at all in 1940s scores, Muller explains in a recent interview. “In the 1940s, Hollywood had their studio orchestras, and were still beholden to that classic European orchestral score approach,” he says. “But in the ’50s, that really changed, and The Man With the Golden Arm had a lot to do with that.”

It’s the kind of deep knowledge I anticipated from a conversation with Muller, who since 2003 has hosted Noir City, a celebration of all things double-crossing and murderous on the silver screen. Each year, the hugely popular festival follows a theme; the first year I attended and realized I’d found my people, it was newspapers. This year’s is music.

That includes films like Gilda, with Rita Hayworth’s famous glove-removing nightclub performance of “Put the Blame on Me,” and A Man Called Adam, starring Sammy Davis Jr. as an alcoholic, self-sabotaging singer and cornet player.

It also includes some films that, Muller admits, stretch the definition of film noir, including not one but two Doris Day movies.

“When people see Love Me or Leave Me, they assume ‘Oh, that’s a Doris Day musical,’” Muller says, adding that people have asked him: How can you possibly pass that off as noir?

“And you know, the answer is that Ruth Etting had a very, very noir life,” he explains.

Etting, a singer and actress who endured threats, a messy divorce and a murder attempt, is portrayed in Love Me Or Leave Me not in gritty black and white, but full MGM Technicolor. Likewise, Pete Kelly’s Blues, with Jack Webb and Janet Leigh, is also in color. But its story is grimy, and its stellar performances by Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee fit the festival’s theme too well to be overlooked.

Speaking of jazz performances, Muller’s lined up a schedule of them to precede each screening, with pianists, guitarists, tap dancers and singer Elizabeth Bougerol (she’s the one on the festival poster this year, spattered in blood). And he’s more than ready to get on stage and make converts of any noir-naysayers, like the woman behind me at the December festival preview at the Grand Lake, who saw the Elvis Presley film King Creole flash on screen and remarked “Elvis?! Really?”

Muller’s response to that is straightforward: “Watch the movie! It’s gangsters, it’s everything. It’s a typical noir story except the guy is a rock singer.” While other Elvis movies were certified fluff for teenagers, he says, “this one has a serious crime element, it’s in black and white … Like, that’s the Elvis noir movie.”

This year also marks the festival’s fourth year at the Grand Lake after leaving its longtime home at the Castro Theatre, which reopens next month to host more concerts than films in a renovated auditorium without its original theater-style seating.

Does Muller ever miss the Castro? “I don’t think about it, honestly,” he says. “What I regret is that San Francisco has no opulent single-screen movie palaces anymore. Like, how is that even possible?”

Meanwhile, Muller’s happy at the Grand Lake, a glorious 1926 movie palace with a curtain, a Wurlitzer and a community of film lovers who huddle together in the dark each year for a few hours of treachery and deceit on screen.

Noir City 23: Face the Music! runs Jan. 16–25, 2026 at the Grand Lake Theatre (3200 Grand Ave., Oakland). Tickets and more information here.