Some Like It Noir!

Elliott Lavine, legendary programmer of Noir and near-Noir films at the Roxie Theater, has selected 30 beauts from the Warner Archives to project in glorious digital black-and-white, having temporarily abandoned the struggle to lug cans of celluloid up to the booth in the oldest continuously running cinema in the States. There'll be no oohing and aahing over fresh-struck prints as we sit, night after night, huddled over our popcorn, scrutinizing these cherished artifacts for their historical, hysterical, mysterious, delirious value. A moment of silence for the absence of physical film during this year's I Wake Up Dreaming festival, Friday, May 16, to Sunday, May 25.

The fest's flashy full-color brochure shows posters of each grisly, garish, grotesque double bill, and details the plot, cast, and run time, so I don't have to. Sometimes just reading the description is enough to make you think twice before entering a darkened theater full of strangers. But you do anyway, because Lavine, if you've had the bad luck to fall under his spell, has taken over your cerebral cortex, and you're now addicted to heavily art-directed depictions of the underside of the American Dream. Above all, don't miss the flashback-within-a-flashback in "The Locket" (1946), Sunday, May 18.

Each double bill has been carefully sculpted for your viewing angst, and really you can't go wrong when you enter the Noir Zone, passing from one thrill-ride to another. You'll savor the lives of losers, weirdos, and creeps who are vicious or simply spineless. You're glad the plots don't make sense. You just want bad things to happen while scary silhouettes dance to a symphony orchestra on overdrive. Watch Robert Mitchum play both a hapless suicide and a heartless killer (spoiler alert). See Chuck Connors get hopped-up on speed ("Death in Small Doses," May 22). Cheer Onslow Stevens and Shirley Knight as the ultimate psychopath enablers ("The Couch," May 25).

The Ann Sheridan double bill (May 17) takes a classy swipe at extended moralizing about the "crime" of adultery. Both 1947 films were directed by Vincent Sherman, who wanted the Oomph Girl for Mrs. Skeffington, but had to settle for Bette Davis. These epic melodramas, Sherman's tribute to the Texan redhead's acting ability, also feature her comely contralto crooning. Nora Prentiss, a retooling of "The Blue Angel," features Kent Smith's greatest performance, as a respected doctor made goofy by the allure of a self-respecting chanteuse. Too chicken to face a divorce court, he stages his own murder. When his face melts in an accident, we gleefully enter the realm of Grand Guignol.

"The Unfaithful" borrows from a Davis triumph, "The Letter" (1940), itself based on M. Somerset Maugham's 1927 play. Although David Goodis gets an "original" screenplay credit, no one familiar with "The Letter" will escape the woozy feeling they've seen this con somewhere before. Goodis shifts the action from Malaysia to semi-tropical Southern California, makes the deceived rubber-plantation owner a real-estate developer, and swaps out the natives for artists. A bare-shouldered bust of the cheating wife replaces the love letter as evidence to be suppressed in her trial for her lover's murder.

Maugham wrote a classic about a bored businessman's wife's unbridled passion for another man; Goodis flips the genders, making the sculptor a stalker whose murder is, for the stalkee, merely a messy solution to a meaningless affair turned inconvenient when hubby returns from war. There are shades, too, of Joan Crawford's iconic "Mildred Pierce" (1945), the mother of all Noirs, which Sheridan regretted having turned down: Zachary Scott and Eve Arden reprise their roles as husband and friend. Lew Ayres, in pencil mustache as the family lawyer, stands by the murdering adulteress as staunchly as Jack Carson stood by innocent-on-all-counts Mildred. Lacking the tragic intensity of Davis or Crawford, Sheridan's an almost documentary choice for a middlebrow sociopath, whose illicit fling with a bohemian threatens her social standing.

Is killing a guy really less problematic than her husband discovering she cheated? In what way exactly is "Mrs. Hunter" ever to be trusted? At any given moment, she tells only the amount of truth inescapable under duress. She's a thoroughly amoral, selfish, status-hungry opportunist for whom "Mr. Hunter" is no match. Ah, Southern Californian womanhood! "The Unfaithful" registers as an accurate portrait of the sunbathed materialism that precluded passion among the cynical well-to-do in post-WWII Los Angeles. I feel like I'm seeing inside my grandmother's three marriages, as the fur-clad cocktail-swilling kicks off at lunch -- although, as far as I know, she never killed anyone.

I Wake Up Dreaming, May 16-25, Roxie Theater, 16th St., San Francisco. Info: (415) 309-2929, www.roxie.com/i-wake-up-dreaming