Queersighted: Queer Noir

Queersighted: Queer Noir

8 Episodes

Queerness simmers beneath the surface of classical Hollywood noir, with its heightened ambiguity, shadowy identities, and free-floating sensuality. Made during the era of the Production Code, which banned “any inference of sex perversion,” these films, with their characters’ murky pasts and murkier motivations, moved to the rhythms of teasing, unspoken eroticism. To accompany their selection—which runs the gamut from cornerstone titles like LAURA and GILDA to lesser-known gut punches like DESERT FURY and CRY OF THE HUNTED —series curator Michael Koresky and special guest programmer Imogen Sara Smith sit down to discuss these tricky films, in which wayward souls are bedeviled by grim, transactional heterosexuality and bewitched by queer pasts and paths not taken.

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Queersighted: Queer Noir

8 Episodes

  • Queersighted: Queer Noir
    41:09
    Queersighted: Queer Noir
    Episode 1

    Queersighted: Queer Noir

    Episode 1

  • The Maltese Falcon
    1:40:34
    The Maltese Falcon
    Episode 2

    The Maltese Falcon

    Episode 2

    Directed by John Huston • 1941 • United States
    Starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor

    A cinematic landmark for a number of reasons—it was the first film directed by John Huston, the film that launched Humphrey Bogart to stardom, and one of the first true noirs—this breathlessly entert...

  • Laura
    1:28:14
    Laura
    Episode 3

    Laura

    Episode 3

    Directed by Otto Preminger • 1944 • United States
    Starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb

    One of the most sophisticated noirs of the 1940s, Otto Preminger’s classic mystery stars Gene Tierney as Laura Hunt, a Manhattan advertising executive who is murdered just before she is set to mar...

  • Double Indemnity
    1:47:55
    Double Indemnity
    Episode 4

    Double Indemnity

    Episode 4

    Directed by Billy Wilder • 1944 • United States
    Starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

    Has dialogue ever been more perfectly hard-boiled? Has a femme fatale ever been as deliciously wicked as Barbara Stanwyck? And has 1940s Los Angeles ever looked so seductively sordid? Wo...

  • Gilda
    1:50:26
    Gilda
    Episode 5

    Gilda

    Episode 5

    Directed by Charles Vidor • 1946 • United States
    Starring Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready

    “Gilda, are you decent?” Rita Hayworth tosses her hair back and slyly responds, “Me?” in one of the great star entrances in movie history. GILDA, directed by Charles Vidor, features a sultry Hayw...

  • The Big Clock
    1:35:29
    The Big Clock
    Episode 6

    The Big Clock

    Episode 6

    Directed by John Farrow • 1948 • United States
    Starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan

    One of the finest suspense thrillers of the 1940s, THE BIG CLOCK stars Ray Milland as a hapless crime-magazine editor plunged into a web of danger when he begins being systematically framed ...

  • Cry of the Hunted
    1:19:10
    Cry of the Hunted
    Episode 7

    Cry of the Hunted

    Episode 7

    Directed by Joseph H. Lewis • 1953 • United States
    Starring Vittorio Gassman, Barry Sullivan, Polly Bergen

    Directed in typically dynamic, imaginative style by B-noir maestro Joseph H. Lewis (GUN CRAZY, THE BIG COMBO) this atmospheric, Louisiana-set cat-and-mouse thriller follows an obsessive lie...

  • Desert Fury
    1:36:00
    Desert Fury
    Episode 8

    Desert Fury

    Episode 8

    Directed by Lewis Allen • 1947 • United States
    Starring John Hodiak, Lizabeth Scott, Burt Lancaster

    Lurid Technicolor, deep-dish melodrama, and gay subtext abound in this pulpy noir firecracker. In the desert town of Chuckawalla, Nevada, tempers flare, passions spark, and violence erupts when Pa...

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