The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 1-7
Twilight (1945)
Directed by Julio Bracho
MoMA is following up its sterling package “Mexico at Midnight: Film Noir from Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age” with a full tribute to one of that series’s brightest lights, director Julio Bracho. This sweaty, nightmarish early meditation on doomed passion is as good a place as any to dip in. Arturo de Córdova is the unlucky lover, a successful surgeon who pioneered an “audacious grafting technique.” Former flame Gloria Marín is the object of his affection, who ensnares him when he sees her posing nude for a sculpture class. The hell of it is she’s now married to his buddy (Manuel Arvide). The style is textbook noir; Canadian-born DP Alex Phillips does his best John Alton imitation, rich with shadows, imprisoning shafts of light split by blinds and raked angles mimicking the good doctor’s mental crookedness. A lovestruck sucker in the vein of Edward G. Robinson’s Scarlet Street schlub, de Córdova’s Dr. Mangino is a study in obsession, only registering smiles when talking to the cutely naive sister (Lilia Michel) of his paramour. Pleasurably grueling, Twilight becomes almost unbearable during a sickeningly tense late scene that has Dr. Mangino delicately chiseling into the skull of his rival, as the shadowy “monster” he dreaded descends (inner monologue: “Are you listening, Dr. Mangino? It’s me—the other you”). Justin Stewart (March 3, 7pm; March 7, 4pm at MoMA’s Bracho retrospective)