One of the best parts of this job is when you're granted a look at some rescued or restored gem from the past. It's one thing to review a film when it's new, but it's something else altogether to be given a chance to weigh in on history. Seeing films like Beyond the Rocks (1922), Army of Shadows (1969) and Killer of Sheep (1977) and getting to write about them is very satisfying. A film that was once ignored or maligned can now be re-established as a classic, and established classics can also be debunked.

This past week I had the opportunity to see two out of 22 films that have recently been cleaned out of the Columbia Pictures vaults, dusted off, refurbished and re-struck. All 22 of them are classic examples of film noir, stories about femmes fatale, detectives, criminals, gamblers, lowlifes, killers, or just generally luckless souls who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time; the genre more or less officially started at the tail end of WWII, as soldiers returned home to find America a very different and not altogether friendly place. Some of these 22 films are cult classics that have remained tantalizingly unseeable over the years, and many others are virtually unknown and waiting to be discovered.
I'm most excited about the opportunity to see Don Siegel's The Lineup (1958) once more; Siegel was one of the toughest of B-movie directors and this San Francisco-based police procedural is one of his best. We also have Samuel Fuller's The Crimson Kimono (1959), a groundbreaking murder story that turns into a racially-charged love triangle. Fritz Lang's Human Desire (1954 -- pictured above), a remake of Jean Renoir's La bête humaine (1938), is about a poor lovestruck sap who finds himself tangled up in a murder. The great Jacques Tourneur is here with Nightfall (1957), from a David Goodis novel. And Nicholas Ray's hard-to-find Knock on Any Door (1949) teamed him with actor Humphrey Bogart the year before they made the classic In a Lonely Place together.

Screaming Mimi (1958) is a potential cult classic by the potential cult director Gerd Oswald, telling the bizarre story of a woman accused of a series of ritual murders and the alcoholic reporter who tries to help. And Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract (1958) is already a cult classic despite its absence from home video; it's the highly stylized story of a hitman who becomes conflicted when he discovers that his latest assignment is a woman. Another cult director, Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy), is here with a double-feature: My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) and So Dark the Night (1946). Director Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World) is a huge fan of The Sniper (1952), the story of a serial killer with a psychological twist.

At the press screenings, I saw Johnny O'Clock (1947), starring Dick Powell in a superb performance as the proprietor of an illegal gambling den. (He wakes up each day after the sun has gone down.) He's both nice when it comes to the ladies and tough when it comes to the gents, and he finds himself in trouble when a dirty cop, and then the cop's girlfriend, a hat check girl at Johnny's club, turn up missing and/or murdered. Ellen Drew is terrific as the cat-like, hard-drinking gangster's moll who carries a torch for Johnny.

I also saw The Burglar (1957), which author David Goodis (Dark Passage, Shoot the Piano Player) adapted from his own novel, giving the movie a weird, serrated tone, as characters butt heads with one another. The great, snaky actor Dan Duryea plays Nat Harbin, a seasoned thief who gets away with a very hot necklace, but finds the heat closing in -- in the form of a crooked cop -- before he can fence it. The real surprise here is Jayne Mansfield, playing the oddly-named Gladden; she can case a joint like nobody's business. Nat is supposed to be looking after her, like a guardian, but she is secretly in love with him. Rather than her usual giggly, airheaded character, she gets to play sad and thoughtful; it's the best I've ever seen her. Better still is the gorgeously atmospheric climax in a spookhouse at an Atlantic City boardwalk amusement park.

That's only a sampling of the films that will be playing, which range from A-list starring vehicles to scrappy, cheap little B-films. All 22 films will play at San Francisco's Roxie Cinema from September 17 to 30, and then Sony will be releasing several of the films in two DVD box sets this November. Hopefully the rest will eventually follow.