Well, maybe not quite THAT long. But the "foisting off of Fregonese" plan has been long in gestation, and reaches its pinnacle for the next two weeks as his retrospective plays at MoMA starting tonight (through September 14).
As noted elsewhere, auteurist approaches to cinema have become as clichéd as any of the other tools of the "career critics" (along with now over-used terms such as "genre conventions"), but Hugo Fregonese is an undeniably interesting character (though by no means more deserving of a complete retrospective than someone like Pierre Chenal or Emil E. Reinert). While one can appreciate the late-career enthusiasm that Dave Kehr brings to the project, a closer look at Fregonese's credits suggests that the brain trust behind this project would have been better served by waiting for another 4-6 films to become available, in order that the outsized emphasis on Fregonese's Hollywood career could be better balanced.
Of course, the big-ticket item for noir fans is BLACK TUESDAY. Let's hope that arrangements are underway for it to make it to NC SF in January, probably paired with either ONE WAY STREET or HARDLY A CRIMINAL.
Here is the schedule for those of you nearby NYC:
Thursday 9/1 HARDLY A CRIMINAL (1949, Arg) [also plays 9/12]
ONE WAY STREET (1950, USA) [also plays 9/12]
Friday 9/2 BLACK TUESDAY (1954, USA) [also plays 9/10]
Saturday 9/3 APACHE DRUMS (1951, USA) [also plays 9/9]
THE RAID (1954, USA) [also plays 9/10]
Sunday 9/4 DECAMERON NIGHTS (1953, UK)
BLOWING WILD (1953, USA) [also plays 9/7]
Monday 9/5 SADDLE TRAMP (1950, USA) [also plays 9/10]
Tuesday 9/6 MAN IN THE ATTIC (1953, USA) [also plays 9/11]
Sunday 9/11 SEVEN THUNDERS (1957, UK) [also plays 9/14]
MY SIX CONVICTS (1952, USA) [also plays 9/14]
Here's a link to MoMA's reprint of Kehr's article on Fregonese first published in FILM COMMENT in 2012. (Oddly, he credits ONE WAY STREET as being James Mason's "debut" film in the USA, when it came out many months after both CAUGHT and THE RECKLESS MOMENT. That glitch aside, it's the usual solid advocacy we've come to expect from Dave.)
https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/771
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