Matinee to Start Your Weekend?
Boston Public Library’s noir film finale this afternoon
Photo by Hendrik Callens
Summer’s preliminary stirrings coincide with the official end of Noir Fridays, the Boston Public Library’s May film series. Today’s closer, Decoy (1946), is an option for those who are able to kick off their weekend with an early work departure.
The film stars Jean Gillie as a dying moll recounting her hunt for her condemned gangster boyfriend’s hidden loot. Decoy has all the elements for a good summer veg-out: seduction, double-crosses, an executed man revived from the gas chamber, and movie trivia (one of the stars, Robert Armstrong, was the guy who brought the big ape to New York in the original King Kong.) Decoy was directed by Gillie’s husband, Jack Bernhard, to introduce the British actress to American audiences. The couple met during the war, but their marriage faltered just after the film wrapped, and Gillie went go on to make only one more film before dying of pneumonia in 1949 at age 33.
Decoy screens at 2 p.m. at the Boston Public Library’s South End branch, 685 Tremont St. By public transit, take the Orange Line to Back Bay station (leaving the station, turn left on Dartmouth, then right on Tremont) or the Green or Red Line (take either to Park Street station, then take the #43 bus to the corner of Rutland Square and Tremont Street).
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