On Movies: Nifty nuggets of noir brighten the festival

'You wake up and the nightmare begins. You look in the mirror and all you see is a stranger."

So goes the tough-guy voice-over on the trailer for

Film Noir,

an animated thriller steeped in the shadowy menace and hard-boiled romanticism of

James M. Cain

and

Raymond Chandler

, of the L.A. of

Chinatown

, of all the alienated, double-crossed, doomed, dangerous and endangered gumshoes of the genre known as noir.

Tucked inside the Philadelphia Film Festival, which began Thursday and runs through April 15, is a nifty little series of noir flicks, including the above-mentioned feature, a mix of vintage pulp and sexually explicit anime created in a Belgrade 'toon studio by codirectors

Risto Topaloski

and

D. Jud Jones

(an alias for longtime L.A.-based commercials director

Srdjan Penezic

).

Film Noir

, screening next Saturday and Sunday, looks a little like

Christian Volckman's

2006 graphic novel-come-to-life,

Renaissance

, and that's not a bad thing. Check out the trailer at:

» READ MORE: www.filmnoirthemovie.com

.

Today at the Ritz Five (and again tomorrow at the Bridge) is

Deadline-U.S.A

., Philadelphian

Richard Brooks'

1952 thriller with

Humphrey Bogart

as a hard-as-nails big-city newspaper editor. Shot in part in the old New York Daily News building on 42d Street, it's a great yarn about news hounds, mobsters, and big-business sell-outs. (Critic

Leonard Maltin

says that a very young

James Dean

shows up as an extra in a newspaper production montage. Watch closely!)

Another Big Apple tale of hoods and hitmen is the little-seen '61

Blast of Silence

, from director

Allen Baron

. An uncredited, gravel-voiced

Lionel Stander

provides the taut narration to this low-budget, black-and-white cult classic, which was penned by blacklisted scribe

Waldo Salt

, under the pseudonym

Mel Davenport

. If you're reading an early edition of the Sunday paper, you might still have time to catch the Saturday-night screening at the Ritz East. If not,

Blast of Silence

shows again tomorrow at the Bridge.

And

Victor Mature

,

Richard Egan

and

Stephen McNally

- along with

Ernest Borgnine

,

J. Carrol Naish

,

Lee Marvin

,

Sylvia Sidney

and

Tommy Noonan

- star in

Violent Saturday

, a widescreen extravaganza about a small-town bank heist and the small town's nut-job citizenry.

Richard Fleischer

directed this doozy, and the festival folks have landed a newly restored CinemaScope print.

The festival's noir series is running in conjunction with the annual Philly-based mystery lit conference, Noircon. For info on that, check out

» READ MORE: www.noircon.com

.

For information on the Philadelphia Film Festival, call 267-765-9700, Ext. 4, or log on to

» READ MORE: www.phillyfests.com

.

Blue-eyed/brown-eyed Bosworth.

21

director

Robert Luketic

has worked with

Kate Bosworth

twice now: on the 2004 retro rom-com

Win a Date With Tad Hamilton

, and on the current hit

21

, in which she plays a member of the crack team of MIT math geniuses who take the Vegas casinos for millions at blackjack.

And while Luketic, an Aussie based in Los Angeles for a while now, knew there was something special about his leading lady, he failed to notice one of the mannequinlike Bosworth's unique features.

"She's got the two different-colored eyes," he said in a recent interview, referring to Bosworth's one blue and one brown iris - a genetic condition called heterochromia, as we all know.

"Do you know that I didn't notice that until like the fourth day of shooting on

Win a Date With Tad Hamilton?

" he says.

"There was a very close-up close-up shot, and I said, 'God, we've got a problem with the lab, something's going on here.' And everyone looked at me like I was from another planet, and they said, 'You've never noticed that she's got two different-colored eyes?' "

Luketic says there was actually a debate among the

Win a Date

studio execs about whether to digitally doctor Bosworth's eyes to make them match. "The phone calls and memos were flying," he says. "That's Hollywood."

Short subjects.

Director

Michael Mann

is assembling the gangs, the G-men and the molls for

Public Enemies

, his 1930s crime pic in which

Johnny Depp

stars as celebrity bad guy

John Dillinger

. Variety announced last week that

Billy Crudup

had been added to the cast, playing FBI director

J. Edgar Hoover

, with

Christian Bale

, Oscar-winner

Marion Cotillard

, and

Stephen Lang

also onboard. Shooting - of the film, and of lots of rat-a-tat-tatting tommy guns - has just started in and around Chicago, and out in Indiana and Wisconsin. . . .

Kurt Eichenwald's

2000 best seller,

The Informant

, about a whistle-blowing agri-business exec, is getting the

Steven Soderbergh

treatment. The director's

Ocean's

star

Matt Damon

will play

the real-life title character,

Mark Whitacre

, with the likes of

Scott Bakula

,

Melanie Lynskey

,

Joel McHale

,

Rick Overton

and

Tom Papa

onboard for this

Grisham

-esque price-fixing thriller. . . . Celebrated '60s kitsch artist

Margaret Keane

- famous for her portraits of kids and waifs with cartoonishly gigantic, soulful eyes - is getting biopic-ed.

Kate Hudson

will star as Margaret, and

Thomas Haden Church

as husband

Walter

, who took credit for much of his wife's work.

Scott Alexander

and

Larry Karaszewski

, writers of

Ed Wood

,

The People vs. Larry Flynt

and

Man on the Moon

, have scripted, and plan to codirect. The Keane project is called

Big Eyes.