You can't lose what you never won

All right, Boston-type people who care about film noir. Every Monday from mid-March through late May, the Somerville Theatre will be running a noir double feature as part of their repertory series Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. It is an enticing selection of classics and deep cuts of which I have seen all but four features, but the $64,000 question is whether I will able to see, at last, on 35 mm at the size it deserves, the superlative queerness of Johnny Eager (1942), whether I chase it or not a month later with the slant companion of I Walk Alone (1947). Pre-2020, I would have parked myself in the balcony for more than half of this series, but I have spent four years dedicatedly avoiding extended stints in the company of strangers and I am not quite ready to trust the CDC as to the common-cold negligibility of the persistent plague. On the other hand, which almost certainly has a drink and a half-chain-smoked cigarette in it, there are few characters even in noir whom I love like Van Heflin's Jeff Hartnett, a man who can slouch even flat on his back and misquote most of the Western canon while he's doing it. "Mr. Freud, take a letter." I am beginning to feel slightly stalked by Sorry, Wrong Number (1948).