With David Thomson selling a new book on film anarchy, and Berkeley transplant Laura Truffaut ready & willing to burnish her dad's legacy, it's a conspicuously trad re-tread "received wisdom" affair for this collection of overly familiar (and often overrated) French noir.

The programmers doubtless think they are clever by showing Melville's overlong heist sequence in LE CERCLE ROUGE the week before they show the film that "inspired" it, but at least their desire to max their ticket sales prevented them from showing them back-to-back!

A holy troika in the continuing heavy-handed mythos of "noir et le nouvelle vague" has already kicked off the series...Melville's first excursion into "l'eternal retour" of the French heist film still remains fresh, but the other two are so overexposed that at this point they are little more than hollow shells...

Also, the concept of a chronological look at French noir (which, if carried forward responsibly, would prove what a lie the "current conception of the French noir canon" really is...) is apparently beyond the grasp of the folks who assembled this shapeless, meandering program...

Of course every effort should be made to see LE JOUR SE LEVE, as in a ranking of film noir "around the world it is absolutely in the Top 5 all-time. But after that, you are advised to stay away until July 26, when a string of seven worthy films will screen (they are shown in bold type).

We can only laugh at the PFA folks trumpeting LE SEPTIÈME JURÉ as a "discovery" when we showed it not once, but TWICE during the run of THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT--first in 2015 (!!!) and again in 2023.

There are so many other films they could have screened instead of mindlessly repeating the first two titles...but things like that are one of the reasons I called my 2020 Bright Lights essay THE BIG SIGH. (My 2027 essay will be titled "First Tragedy, Then Farce: The Decline of Imagination in Repertory Film Programming"...)

June 4 — Bob the Gambler (Bob le flambeur) Melville
June 6 — Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) Malle
June 7 — Breathless (À bout de souffle) Godard
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June 13 — The Fingerman (Le doulos) Melville
June 17 — Le Samouraï (Le samouraï) Melville (sold out)
June 20 — The Red Circle (Le cercle rouge) Melville
June 27 — Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes) Dassin
July 3 — Daybreak (Le jour se lève) Carné
July 12 — Pierrot the Madman (Pierrot le fou) Godard
July 18 — Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste) Truffaut
July 24 — Mississippi Mermaid (La sirène du Mississippi) Truffaut
July 26 — The Raven (Le corbeau) Clouzot
July 29 — Panic (Panique) Duvivier
August 2 — The Clockmaker of St. Paul (L'horloger de Saint-Paul) Tavernier
August 6 — The Hole (Le trou) Becker
August 9 — The Seventh Juror (Le septième juré) Lautner
August 19 — Bob the Gambler (Bob le flambeur) Melville (repeat)
August 27 — Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) Clément
August 28 — Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) Malle (repeat)