Noir for a Summer Night

My brother and I attended a film noir screening last weekend and for a while it turned into a real noir experience for me.

For those not familiar with what film noir is, a very brief description of it might be that it is a genre or style of crime movie which is usually characterized by shadowy low-key lighting, a bleak urban setting, and corrupt, cynical characters. It could involve nightmarish situations or images that many times end in disaster for the protagonist. I found myself the protagonist in my very own noir adventure that night.

The evening started out normal enough (as is usually the case with any noir story). My brother picked me up and we drove out to Santa Monica for the film showing. (Incidentally, Santa Monica is a place that pops up from time to time in Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlow stories.

Chandler was a master of noir detective pulp fiction back in the mid 20th Century.) Traffic was light, and parking on the street was easy. My brother parked the car and since we had some time to kill before the screening, we walked over to a little Mexican restaurant and bar across from the theater to have a drink.

Sitting at the bar, I ordered a Paloma which is a cocktail made with tequila, lime juice, and grapefruit soda in a tall glass filled with ice. Very refreshing on a balmy summer evening. My brother had a vodka and tonic. We both enjoyed our drinks, chatted with the bar tender, then made our way to the theater for the first feature of the night, "A Double Life" a 1948 picture starring Ronald Coleman.

Choosing our seats on the left side of the theater, we sat in the first two seats on the aisle. We still had around twenty minutes or so before the show was to start. Soon after, a middle aged couple walked down the aisle and stood near us looking around, trying to decide where to light.

They looked down at our row, then away. Looked down again, and whispered to one another. At last they decided. They wanted to sit past us, in our row. My brother and I naturally stood up, pushing our bodies back towards our seats so that they could squeeze by, and then we sat back down.

Arriving about two or three seats past where we were, they sat down. Or rather one of them sat down. The other one shuffled her way back toward us toward the aisle. Evidently she had forgotten to do or get something somewhere, so again my brother and I stood up to let her pass. She got past, we sat down. After a time, she returned. We stood up to let her squeeze back in. She filed past us. We sat down.

It wasn't long before the other one decided to get up and do something. Here he comes, doing that slow little side shuffle that people do when they want to make their way past seats to get to the aisle. We stood up. He shuffled past. We sat down. I hoped he would never come back. But he did. We stood up. He squeezed in past us. We sat down.

Almost show time and in the corner of my eye I see movement to my left. The two annoying people get up. Both of them. They start toward us. We stand up. They slither past. We sit down. But this time they'll never come back. They've changed seats. Figuring they've done all the damage they could to us, they'll start annoying someone new.

At any rate, it was time for the host of the noir festival, Eddie Muller, to walk on stage to give his introduction. As he began his talk, I can't tell you why, but my hand reached over to the inside pocket of my jacket where I put my cell phone. My heart sank when I didn't feel anything. My phone was gone.

I looked down at the floor under my seat. Nothing. I squatted down and felt around behind my seat. Nothing. I looked over at the floor of the aisle and up the aisle. Nope. "I've lost my phone," I said to my brother. "Are you sure you didn't leave it at home?" "No, no, I had it with me when I got into your car," I said. All the while, Muller is in the middle of his intro. I'm sure it was interesting, but I'll never know because at this point I can't hear anything. My head isn't into film noir, it's into self-flagellation.

"You stupid jerk! How the hell can you lose your phone? You really shouldn't leave the house anymore," I say to myself. My wife is home alone and what if she needs to reach me? I start to think what my next steps should be. I lean over to my brother and tell him that maybe it fell out of my pocket at the bar. "I've got to run over there and find out," I say. Out of the theater I go, and back across the street. I ask the bartender, but no, she hasn't seen a cell phone and no one has turned one in. I rush back to the theater.

As I enter, the workers are all gathered together at the concession stand. "Anyone turn in a cell phone?" I ask. No. As I return to my seat the house lights are down and the movie is already playing. "No luck," I whisper to my brother. He suggests it might have fallen out in the car and he asks if I want him to go and check. I can't let him do that. I figure if it is in the car, then it's safe. If it's fallen into the street or on the sidewalk, it's gone by now anyway. Might as well just wait until the picture's over and we'll find out when we get back to the car.

I sit there, my eyes on the movie screen, but I don't really see anything. My heart is pumping, my mind is going a mile a minute, and I continue to blame myself for being so careless. Then, after a little while, once again, like earlier when I reached in my inside pocket for no real reason, I decided to kneel down and swipe my hand under the seat directly in front of me. I don't know what possessed me to do that, but I did. And I found my phone.

The phone had evidently fallen out of my inside jacket pocket one of the times I stood up to let the two annoying people get by. My brother was relieved for me and as we watched the rest of the picture I could feel my blood pressure slowly coming back to normal.

Lucky for me, unlike most noir stories, this one did not end in disaster.

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