Noir Nights with Josh Fadem - Honoring Lucien Ballard

A Walk of Fame Tribute to Lucien Ballard

Feature Film • Film Noir • 1hr 13m • Not Rated • Screen 1

$5 members, $8 non-members. Hosted by: Josh Fadem

Noir Nights returns, and this one is special. We're screening The Killer Is Loose in honor of Lucien Ballard, the Oklahoma-born cinematographer whose work spanned over 150 films and who joins the 2026 Circle Cinema Walk of Fame.  In addition to the screening of The Killer is Loose, there will be a screening of The Wild Bunch at 7:15pm on Monday, July 20th.

About the Film

Mild-mannered bank teller Leon "Foggy" Poole looks like the last man in the world you'd fear. When robbers hit his bank, he plays the hero, but Detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotten) soon learns Poole was the inside man all along. The arrest goes wrong, Poole's wife is killed, and a quiet clerk walks into prison vowing revenge. Years later he escapes, and the detective's own wife (Rhonda Fleming) becomes his target.

Director Budd Boetticher made this taut little thriller right before his celebrated run of Randolph Scott westerns, and he made it with Lucien Ballard behind the camera, a man Boetticher called the best cinematographer there ever was. Ballard turns bright suburban streets and ordinary 1950s kitchens into something quietly menacing, finding dread in broad daylight. Wendell Corey is unforgettable as Poole, a killer who looks more normal than anyone around him. The same year, Ballard would go on to shoot Stanley Kubrick's The Killing.

Circle Cinema Walk of Fame

This screening celebrates Lucien Ballard's induction into the Circle Cinema Walk of Fame. Located on the east sidewalk of Circle Cinema, the Walk of Fame honors Oklahomans who have made significant contributions to the film industry, with new and posthumous recipients honored each year during the Circle Cinema Film Festival, scheduled around our birthday on July 15th. This year we're proud to honor four Oklahomans: Olivia Jordan, Jeremy Charles, Ralph Blane, and Lucien Ballard. The medallion ceremony is free and open to all. It begins with a reception at 6pm on Wednesday, July 15th, continues into Screen 1 for a short ceremony, and ends outside in the evening with the medallion reveal. For more information, visit us here.

Lucien Ballard (1904–1988) — Born in Oklahoma and of Cherokee descent, Ballard studied at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Pennsylvania before breaking into Hollywood as a film cutter and earning his first cinematography credits on Josef von Sternberg productions. Over a five-decade career he shot more than 130 films and became a celebrated stylist, equally at home in moody black-and-white and sweeping color, and a favorite of directors including Stanley Kubrick (The Killing), Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah (Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch). A master of the Western landscape, he also devised a soft, line-smoothing light nicknamed "the Obie" for actress Merle Oberon, to whom he was briefly married. Ballard earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography for The Caretakers (1963) and won the National Society of Film Critics Award for The Wild Bunch. "I want to contribute to a picture, not just work on it," he once said.