In 1950, the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the contemporaneous critical response to his stories and those of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, et. al. that:

It takes a very open mind indeed to look behind the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of lukewarm consommé at a spinsterish tearoom.

We were reminded of Chandler's defensive tone on Saturday at the Palace of Fine Arts, where the Film Noir Foundation and LitQuake combined to present NoirQuake! (exclamation point sic.), "a hard-boiled afternon of noir readings and film clips." The museum-opening crowd, dotted with more fedoras than usual, assembled to sip chardonnay and hear local authors read from their favorite noirs. Chandler's come a long way, baby--these are exactly the kind of people who, 50 years ago, dismissed hard-boiled fiction as trashy, gaudy, and barely acceptable. They had fun Saturday, though; it was hard not to. Joe Gores read from Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Joyce Maynard read from Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, Barry Gifford read from Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Joe Loya read from W.R. Burnett's The Asphalt Jungle, Daniel Handler read from Patricia Highsmith's Strangers On A Train, Robert Mailer Anderson read from Cornell Woolrich's "Rear Window," Gary Phillips read from Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, Michelle Tea read from Jim Thompson's The Grifters, and Peter Plate read (more like declaimed, actually, from memory, sounding like a poetry slam--interesting choice) from Charles Willeford's Miami Blues. Each reading was followed by the same scene from the film adaptaion of the novel or story.

Although a program that starts with Hammett and Humphrey Bogart and ends with Willeford and Alec Baldwin tells a rather unpleasant story about U.S. culture and progress since the 40s, these books and movies are almost uniformly great. As if to drive home the point about how noir's cultural status has changed, M Is For Mystery bookstore was hawking the high-class Library of America collections of Chandler's and Hammett's work alongside The Life and Times of Sean Penn (Spicoli himself appeared later in the evening to talk about film noir).

As a literary event, NoirQuake was really quite plush. They did a nice job dressing up the PFA auditorium, already one of the nicest venues on the LitQuake event map, to look like the deco sets of classical film noir. The food and drink selection easily surpassed the usual Trader Joe's wine and cheese (very important note--we're not dissing TJ's, wine, or cheese) that one usually finds at readings. The booksellers were equipped to take credit cards. The sound was clear, there was a nice thematic unity to the readings, and of course, there were nice moving pictures to supplement the literature--words can get a little boring, y'know?

As a film festival event, though, NoirQuake left much to be desired, beginning with some chairs. There weren't enough to go around, and they weren't set up to allow a viewer to see past the row in front of him. Because the films were projected on the wall on either side of the podum where the readers stood, none of the chairs were pointed at the screen. Nobody turned down the house lights--or even turned off the spotlight directed at the podium (remember, the podium is right next to the screen where the movie's playing) between readings and screenings. Most damningly, for those film buffs who fetishize the apparatus (i.e., all of them, us, whatever), every clip was projected from DVD or VHS--not a single reel of actual film appeared at NoirQuake.

We know they've worked out kinks like that at the Balboa Theater, where the NoirCity film festival continues all this week: we are used to seeing beautifully preserved films at the Balboa, where all the chairs face the screen. We'll be there Wednesday for The Blue Dahlia, the film that killed Raymond Chandler, and Thursday for Gilda, the film that made Rita Hayworth. Check the program, put on your fedora and go to every screening your schedule allows.