NIGHT TRAIN   (1959)  MONDAY, MAR 23, 9:15

ALL the world was noir in the years following World War II.

Sure, there were other film genres hard at work competing for ticket sales; but it's interesting to note that as noir's box office clout began to slide in America, it began to flourish elsewhere. (Our schedule for the first edition of A RARE NOIR IS GOOD TO FIND confirms that—fourteen of the fifteen films in the program date from after 1955, and eight from after 1960.)

Pioneering noir historian Spencer Selby has called this phenomenon "the world-wide noir tradition." The prolific nature of it is truly astonishing, and we are just beginning to scratch the surface of the dark visions that came to life with such vivid bleakness on all the continents of the world.

Roxie audiences who were mesmerized last November by the case we made for the "undiscovered continent" of French noir will now have the opportunity to search vistas leading us to a global "virus" that spread its message of deep skepticism about human nature and explored the fissures in class and gender relations that were left stubbornly untransformed in the aftermath of war.

Incredibly, ten of the fifteen films screening in A RARE NOIR IS GOOD TO FIND! have not been seen in American theaters for more than a half-century. That itself is a crime greater or equal to any committed in the films screening in this series; Midcentury Productions (Don Malcolm) and I Wake Up Dreaming (Elliot Lavine) are only too pleased to remedy that situation. A RARE NOIR IS GOOD TO FIND travels to ten countries to trace this "noir diaspora" in a series of stunning discoveries. It takes the viewer far beyond the currently known shores of "international noir." Join us as we crisscross the world in search of these darkly shining nuggets of noir…