By Paul Bendix
About this blog: A 32-year resident of Menlo Park, I regularly make my way around downtown in a wheelchair. This gives me an unusual perspective on a town in which I have spent almost half of my life. I was educated at UC Berkeley, and permanentl...
(More)About this blog: A 32-year resident of Menlo Park, I regularly make my way around downtown in a wheelchair. This gives me an unusual perspective on a town in which I have spent almost half of my life. I was educated at UC Berkeley, and permanently injured there in a 1968 mugging. Half paralyzed at 21, it took me 11 years to find full-time work. A high-tech job drew me to the Peninsula in the early 1980s. After years as a high-tech marketing writer, I retired and published my own book, Dance Without Steps (Oliver Press, New York, 2012). Having long aspired to café society, I frequent Peet's on Santa Cruz Avenue. Rolling through our downtown, I reflect on my own life - which I have restarted several times. My wife died in 2009. I remarried in July, 2013.
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Author David Meuel has a knack for illuminating Hollywood's classic periods and genres, cranking out a lively series of film books. The latest from the Menlo Park writer celebrates both film noir and westerns. Meuel (pronounced 'moil') get celebrated himself this weekend and next at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
The Center's festival "Dark Horse: Film Noir Westerns," screens movies that fuse the two forms. You can be ignorant about movies, like me, and thoroughly enjoy Meuel's look under the surface of popular culture.
"Something very curious happened in American films beginning in the mid and late 1940s," Meuel says. "Increasingly, movies became much darker in tone and subject matter. We first saw this new sensibility in crime films, but it soon became evident in many other kinds of films, including that most optimistic of American inventions, the movie western. How this all happened, and the enormous impact noir had on the western is something we continue to feel deeply today both in films and on television."
The noir/western film series is at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco (www.ybca.org/dark-horse).
On April 12th, Meuel discusses William Wellman's classic 1943 film 'The Ox-Bow Incident' starring Henry Fonda. He also discusses Raoul Walsh's haunting 1947 'Pursued' starring Robert Mitchum and Teresa Wright.
On April 19th, Meuel will introduce Andre de Toth's 1947 film 'Ramrod' starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. He also examines Henry King's 'The Gunfighter' starring Gregory Peck.
Meuel's book
The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range, 1943-1962 is published by McFarland.
