Based on the just-concluded 2013 Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs, I'd highly recommend making plans now to attend the 2014 edition. This annual four-day retreat into the alluring darkness of film noir -- held, paradoxically, in the sun-drenched desert oasis of Palm Springs, Calif. -- is hugely enjoyable, relaxed, low-key fun. Yet it's also of serious interest to fans and scholars alike. Of the twelve films shown this year, in a 72-hour period from Thursday night, May 16, through Sunday afternoon, May 19, six featured extraordinary special guests engaging in Q&A following the screenings, and almost all the films were shown in crisp 35mm prints, on a large screen at the comfy Camelot Theater. Even the popcorn was good.

The festival has been held every May since 2001, when it was founded by Palm Springs resident and writer Arthur Lyons. Lyons died in 2008, but the festival has continued strongly with leadership from film historian Alan K. Rode (producer and host of the festival since 2008), veteran casting director Marvin Paige, Palm Springs residents Ric and Rozene Supple, and the San Francisco-based Film Noir Foundation, which also presents annual noir festivals in Hollywood, San Francisco and Chicago.

The opening-night movie was Three Strangers (1946), written by John Huston and Howard Koch and originally intended as a quasi-sequel/follow-up to Huston's earlier The Maltese Falcon (1941). But in the end, only two actors from Falcon appeared in this film -- Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet -- resulting in a movie that has a bit of the look and feel of Falcon but stands on its own. The most interesting connection is actually the presence of Geraldine Fitzgerald, who was originally offered the part of Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, ultimately played by Mary Astor. In Three Strangers, Fitzgerald plays a femme fatale who comes pretty close to the manipulative, double-crossing, villainous Brigid, thereby giving a sense of how she might have come across in Falcon. As Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller said, Mary Astor may have been superb, but based on Three Strangers, "Geraldine Fitzgerald would have been the ultimate Brigid O'Shaughnessy." Fitzgerald certainly is superb here, and the movie, directed atmospherically by Jean Negulesco, is well worth a look next time it plays on TCM. The fable-like story concerns the intersecting lives of three strangers who share in a winning lottery ticket, and the film has the feel of an anthology movie with its separate stories that eventually overlap. One of its themes is greed, anticipating Huston's next film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).

Following the screening, Muller interviewed director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the son of Geraldine Fitzgerald, who found out late in his life that his father was Orson Welles (though he suspected it from an early age). It was the result of an affair when Fitzgerald was part of Welles' Mercury Theater. Lindsay-Hogg recounts all this and more in his memoir, Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age. He also aptly described Peter Lorre as "the acting equivalent of a baseball pitcher who throws a knuckleball. You never know where it's going to end up. He was one of the most eccentric actors God ever created. And one of the best."

Day 2 of the festival began with Alias Nick Beal (1949), much more of a rarity and an outstanding rediscovery. It's a Faustian, allegorical tale of DA Thomas Mitchell declaring he'd sell his soul to the devil in order to put away a local mobster. Well, the devil shows up to collect -- in the form of Ray Milland -- and proceeds to underhandedly manipulate various characters, including a wonderful Audrey Totter, whom he wins over to his side with clothes, jewels and a swanky free apartment. Director John Farrow, who turned down The Great Gatsby (1949) with Alan Ladd in order to make this picture, provides gorgeous atmospherics, with Milland emerging out of the fog in the darkness and mysteriously popping up in all sorts of evocative sets. The supernatural element isn't too heavy-handed, but as Eddie Muller pointed out, Farrow's Catholicism made him especially good with issues of sin and guilt. Muller also noted that while he will be hosting a night of film noirs on TCM this June that were written by screenwriter Jonathan Latimer, Alias Nick Beal was unable to be included -- meaning that for the time being fans can only catch it at festivals like this one.

Mary Ryan, Detective (1949) can really only be called marginally "noir," but it's a 68-minute slice of good fun as Marsha Hunt plays a young, perky detective who goes undercover to bring down a shoplifting ring. It was designed to be the first of a series of films that would star Hunt as Mary Ryan, but her subsequent McCarthy-era blacklisting significantly dimmed her career. Speaking with Alan K. Rode after the screening, the 95-year-old actress, charming and beautiful as ever, said she had no regrets, and held the house as she relayed stories from the studio era. At one point, Rode said, "At Paramount in the '30s, you worked with people like John Wayne" -- and Hunt deadpanned, "There were no people like John Wayne," drawing a big laugh.

One of the most frightening and disturbing movies ever made, Try and Get Me! (1950) was recently restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive with funding provided by the Film Noir Foundation. The restoration played earlier this year at the San Francisco and Los Angeles film noir festivals, as well as at the TCM Classic Film Festival, and in Palm Springs it again filled the house and unnerved the audience with its tremendous power. Written by Jo Pagano and based on his novel The Condemned, the Cy Endfield-directed drama stars Frank Lovejoy and Lloyd Bridges as a criminal duo whose eventual capture leads to an unrelenting outpouring of mob violence that has not lost one ounce of its horror. It's also a still-topical comment on the power of the media to rile up the public with a simplistic, ill-informed take on an actually far more complex reality. The film performed badly at the box office and deserves to be far better known today. Hopefully, the restoration will help accomplish just that.

Following Try and Get Me! was Edge of Doom (1950), creating a one-two punch of grim, downbeat, pitch-black drama like no other. But for fans of film noir, that's a good thing! Edge of Doom is not as viscerally gut-wrenching as Try and Get Me!, but it is a literally darker film overall. Farley Granger spends the movie walking around New York (in reality downtown L.A.) mostly at night in a film that rarely sees the light of day. Granger's mother has died, and on his quest to secure a grand funeral for her, despite his impoverished circumstances, his fury at the world results in his accidentally killing a priest. And now he is on the run from the law. In the first-rate supporting cast, Dana Andrews plays another priest, Paul Stewart plays a neighbor in Granger's tenement, and Robert Keith is superb as a police captain. In a smaller role is Joan Evans, who was present to speak after the screening with film historian Foster Hirsch.

Evans remembered that director Mark Robson was focused more on the technical production than on the actors, and she and Hirsch discussed at length the involvement of Granger and producer Samuel Goldwyn, who had discovered Evans and cast her in three pictures. Edge of Doom was the only film noir that Goldwyn ever produced; he bought the novel at the insistence of his wife, who liked the story's affirmation of the Catholic faith. But he never really liked the movie. And Farley Granger detested it. "He had a special animosity for it," said Hirsch, "and never said a kind word about the film or Goldwyn. He said, 'This film drove all our careers to the edge of doom.'" Nonetheless, Granger's intensity sustains our interest, and the film casts a significant spell. Upon its initial release, Edge of Doom was a disaster; the downbeat material was not well-received, nor did Granger's many female fans appreciate seeing their hero in such a grim tale. Goldwyn pulled the film, scrapped half of it, reshot and reshaped the story, added a little romantic subplot with a character played by Mala Powers to try and appease the female fans, and made the overall story somewhat less depressing -- but upon rerelease the picture still flopped.

Day 3 kicked off with High Tide (1947), a Monogram gem whose recent restoration by UCLA was also funded by the Film Noir Foundation, and continued with the fellow poverty-row title Strange Illusion (1945), a low-budget gem from director Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour [1945], Ruthless [1948]). Appropriately labeled by Alan K. Rode as "Hamlet on steroids," it stars 21-year-old Jimmy Lydon as a young man who has a strange dream (or, yes, illusion) that an unknown man is walking with him, his sister and his recently widowed mother -- and that this man is taking over the family and had something to do with the father's death. The man turns out to be Warren William (in one of his final films), who with his psychiatrist and business partner (Regis Toomey) does seem to be up to no good, and bits and pieces of Lydon's dream start to come true. This loose (to put it mildly) adaptation of Hamlet boasts intriguing style and visual flourishes from Ulmer, and is well worth a look.

Jimmy Lydon, who is about to turn 90, took the stage afterward and engaged in a freewheeling, energetic discussion of his career. He related how he learned on the job both on stage and in film, out of necessity because he was at the time the only breadwinner in his family of nine. "I got star billing in the first picture I ever made [Back Door to Heaven, 1939] and I didn't know anything about picture acting!" he exclaimed. Mentored and signed by the great director William K. Howard, Lydon was the only child actor at RKO for a spell, and used his time there to educate himself in all aspects of filmmaking, and later became a successful producer. As an actor, Lydon gave Elizabeth Taylor her first screen kiss, in Cynthia (1947), and scored as the title character in the long-running "Henry Aldrich" franchise at Paramount. Lydon revealed that he still to this day gets a dozen fan letters a month asking only about Henry Aldrich, with one or two actually addressed to Henry Aldrich!

Following the fine boxing noir Champion (1949) starring Kirk Douglas, Day 3 ended with Murder, Inc. (1960), a brutal remake of The Enforcer (1951) set in the world of 1930s organized crime. It stars Peter Falk in an Oscar-nominated screen debut, as well as Stuart Whitman, who was on hand to speak about his career afterwards.

The final day began with the first-rate The Suspect (1944), a near-perfect "period noir" from director Robert Siodmak that for some reason has fallen off the radar over the years, especially in comparison to his far better-known noir titles like The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949). Charles Laughton stars here in one of his own favorite movies as Philip, married in turn-of-the-century London to a wife from hell like none other, Cora (Rosalind Ivan). Philip tries hard, and genuinely, to make things work with Cora, but she is too horrible a human being to even consider budging an inch. So the lonely Laughton meets and starts an affair with the young and sweet Mary (Ella Raines), and it's a huge accomplishment that Bertram Millhauser's screenplay makes Mary's love for the older, rotund Philip eminently believable. When Cora finds out about the affair, and threatens to bring down not only Philip but Mary's reputation, too, Philip turns to the course of action that characters in film noir tend to turn to -- murder. But that is hardly the end of this compulsively engaging movie. If ever there was a movie in which the audience wants a character to commit murder, and still roots for him all the way, even as he digs himself in deeper, The Suspect is it. And while movies in the "post-Code" era had only a limited number of ways of handling murderers, The Suspect is so skillfully devised that the ending still feels satisfying.

Another Robert Siodmak picture from the same year followed: Christmas Holiday (1944), starring Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly. One of the most unusual movies in all of noir, from its title to its unlikely casting, Christmas Holiday is a genuine, rarely-screened curiosity that pits Gene Kelly as a gambler married to innocent Deanna Durbin; living with them is Kelly's domineering mother (Gale Sondergaard, in another bit of weird casting). When Kelly ends up in jail, Durbin becomes a singer in a bordello (yes), where she meets a soldier stranded on his furlough, and relates her story to him via flashback. Past catches up to present for the final climax. The framing device with the WWII soldier may have been a key reason this film resonated with audiences; it tied the story to their direct present-day experiences and mindsets, yet still allowed them to enter another world within the movie that had nothing to do with World War II. The bulk of the movie therefore became, in a sense, poignant escapism both for the soldier hearing Durbin's story and for the film audience.

This was touted as Durbin's first adult role, and she is given the chance to sing two songs here, though neither drives the plot. This is no musical. Watching Kelly in a rare straight, sinister role is fascinating. He is convincing, even as he moves through the frame with dancer-like precision. It was six years before he'd be cast in another drama, Black Hand (1950), and it's a pity he didn't get many more such opportunities. Present after the screening for a Q&A with Alan K. Rode was Kelly's widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, who said her husband told her he had thought this Somerset Maugham novel to be unfilmable. He didn't want to do the picture but had no choice, as he was loaned to Universal to make it in exchange for Turhan Bey, whom MGM wanted for Dragon Seed (1944). Deanna Durbin, in fact, specifically asked Universal to acquire Kelly for this part. And in the end, Durbin would cite Christmas Holiday as her favorite film while Gene Kelly would cite it as among his least favorites! He joked that the film's commercial success was due to the fact that "everybody thought it was a musical with me and Deanna Durbin."

Mrs. Kelly also spoke eloquently about Gene Kelly's overall career, revealing that he wanted to be remembered most for his innovations behind the camera: his choreography, his directing, and his accomplishments in placing dance on screen in new and innovative ways. Mrs. Kelly, who is writing a biography of her husband, has been traveling the world in recent months presenting a one-woman show about his life and career, complete with film clips and actual props from his films, and there seemed to be great interest from those assembled in bringing the show to Palm Springs. (More information about the Kelly shows can be found at www.genekelly.org).

After one more show -- John Huston's masterful heist drama The Asphalt Jungle (1950) -- the festival was put to bed for another year. The audiences throughout the four days were fantastic -- extremely respectful, quiet and attentive during all the screenings. All the films were sold close to capacity, but one never felt rushed or uncomfortably crowded. The spacing between start times was just enough to grab a snack or meal if one wanted to see all the offerings. In all, this was a professionally produced four-day festival providing great value for its cost, and classic movie fans planning a trip to a future edition will not be disappointed.

For more information about the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, go to arthurlyonsfilmnoir.ning.com.

By Jeremy Arnold