Double Indemnity News

By STEWART SMITH Entertainment Writer Welcome back one and all as I continue my examination of the works of director Billy Wilder, this week taking on his classic noir "Double Indemnity." If you're just joining us, my "Catching Up On" column is a chance for me to write about the films and directors that I've yet to have much exposure to.

Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications is running a video online on the making of WGN Channel 9's holiday special "Bozo, Gar & Ray." It's almost too meta, as a making-of documentary about a making-of documentary about three fondly remembered local TV series: "Bozo's Circus," "Garfield Goose" and "Ray Rayner & Friends." Yet it's nonetheless ...

It's going to be a very special holiday for movie fans this year as Turner Classic Movies presents the rarely seen gem Remember the Night during a December packed with holiday favorites.

One can assume that certain moviegoers have been violently opposed to movie violence since the first fist was thrown on the silver screen.

This year, Warner began to release a series of smaller films direct to the audience via the Warner Archive .

Clark Art held several film series for their summer exhibitions this year, and donated all the DVDs to the David & Joyce Milne Public Library.

Mae Brunken wanted a home with a past. And in a plot with an only-in- Hollywood ending, the interior designer and set decorator found her period piece -- one with a film noir pedigree.

There may not have been many Quebecois films at this year's film festival, but those that did appear were first-rate. Sylvain Guy 's film noir Detour could not have been more pure, genrewise.

She visited the Philippines a number of times when her father served in the Peace Corps in Mindanao.

Double Indemnity goes down as the first and only time the words "insurance salesman" and "interesting" have been used in the same sentence.

Last night,A Project Runway went Hollywood: the designers had to create a look based on classic Hollywood genres, one of which was film noir.

The two great films chronicling the transition from silent movies to talkies are "Singin' in the Rain" and Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard." The first is an innocent, light-hearted send-up about a handful of actors who had to adjust to the changes in the medium.

Mae Brunken wanted a home with a past. The interior designer and set decorator ultimately found her period piece high in the hills of Hollywood: a 1927 Spanish Colonial Revival that starred as the home of Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity." As principal of Mae Brunken Design , Brunken likes to create spaces "around a character ...

Austin Film Society starts a new Essential Cinema series tonight: " Censors, Drop Your Scissors! Billy Wilder's Later Comedies ." The series runs on Tuesday nights for the next five weeks.

Every week, Film School Rejects presents a movie that was made before you were born and tells you why you should like it.

Horror, comedy, a silent movie and a documentary on surfing are a few of the film genres that will be on tap for the 2009-10 season of the Loras College Classic Educational Film Series.

It's a world of scheming vixens, lonesome gumshoes and wheedling informers. Someone's to blame for film noir, but who? Matthew Sweet lines up the suspects The hero who's on the way to the gallows, and knows it.

You know what you'll get in film noir, the most recognizable style in Hollywood from the early 1940s to the late '50s: Black and white shadows in stark lines enveloping the room.

BISEXUAL,feisty,foul-mouthed,chain-smoking, alcoholic ... Barbara Stanwyck was the living embodiment of the characters she played and the adage that dynamite comes in small packages.

News and notes from the publishing world: Alice Walker , the Berkeley author, has written one of 10 letters that Amnesty International has sent to President Obama, urging the president to investigate and prosecute acts of torture committed during George W. Bush's tenure.