Oakland was quiet enough Wednesday night that I got all the way to San Francisco for a flick — “Cry Tough” set in Spanish Harlem – that’s part of an underground noir series/cocktail salon.  
The films, 16-mm reels shown in a secret location that is disclosed by the Danger and Despair Knitting Circle at its discretion, are “impossibly rare and hard-to-find” titles. And they’re free. But the booze isn’t.
“Can we have a martini?” I asked my boyfriend, who was my guide for the night. Yes, he resplied, we can. In fact, a martini might be considered obligatory at a noir film. Drinks in hand, we settled into our impossibly uncomfortable chairs that were never meant to hold a rear end for an hour and a half. But the City Club was a big step up from the small rooms in dismal basements where the group started five years ago, when the audience was 40 to 50 hard core, noir-files and cinema buffs. The room was near capacity at 115 people last night, according to the Robert Marion.
A guy by the name of Chuck, dressed from the waist up like a rumpled reporter from 1936, introduced the film, which featured zero Puerto Rican actors although it was supposed to be the story of the newest immigrants to the United States in 1959, Puerto Ricans. “This is the story of one of its sons” Miguel Estrada (played by John Saxon), an ex-con trying to go straight who gets caught between his American dreams and immigrants’ hard-luck reality.  ”Do I have to rot here because I was born a generation too son?” he asks his father. “Everyone else busted out before us: Italians, Irish, Jews.”
 The double-crossing dame Santa, played by Argentinian actress Linda Cristal, has some sharp lines: “Nothin’s shakin’ but the bacon and that’s taken,” Read the rest of this entry »