United States
1985
78 minutes
Black and White
1.33:1
English
407
With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature Mala Noche heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day-shifters, and bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound nighttime, as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant. Mala Noche was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating capsule from a time and place that continues to haunt its director’s work.
| Walt | Tim Streeter |
| Johnny | Doug Cooeyate |
| Roberto "Pepper" | Ray Monge |
| Betty, Walt's girl | Nyla McCarthy |
| Hotel clerk | Sam Downey |
| Drunk man | Bob Pitchlynn |
| Policeman | Eric Pedersen |
| Bar friend | Marty Christiansen |
| Featured wino | Bad George Connor |
| Himself | Don Chambers |
| George | Walt Curtis |
| Director | Gus Van Sant |
| Producer | Gus Van Sant |
| Screenplay | Gus Van Sant |
| Cinematography | John Campbell |
| Sound | Pat Baum |
| Music | Creighton Lindsay |
| Additional photography | Eric Alan Edwards |
| From the book by | Walt Curtis |
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
It’s been only four years since the last film in his Death Trilogy, but Gus Van Sant is already journeying back to the land of the dead. Variety reports that the director will be teaming up with Bret Easton Ellis on a screenplay about the lives and 2007 double suicide of writer . . .
“They all say that I’m ‘openly gay.’ But they put that in as a little political footnote . . . They don’t say anything about gayness. They just say, ‘He’s openly gay.’ They relate it a little bit to something, but they just get through with that bit.” —Gus Van Sant on his press coverage, in . . .
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