Libraries at the Movies

Some thoughts on Hammett (1982)

2012-02-27T21:45:00.000Z

A troubled production and genetically-confused origins are to blame for this unpolished and overscripted failure, which feels like cheap television but wants to be Chinatown. The miasma led the great New York Times critic Vincent Canby to write: "heaven only knows what it's supposed to be about or why it was made". In its conceit of the detective-writer turning detective it doesn't even work as pastiche (which it's not meant to be in any case), and its presumptions towards John Huston's 1941 film version of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon fail miserably. Hammett's men of nails are replaced by catamites, cabalistic capitalists, and giggling concubines, and his masterfully laconic descriptions are reduced to hackneyed gin-joints and necessarily foggy wharves.

In trying to figure out why Hammett is surrounded by these people and what they're meant to be doing, you can easily miss the fact that most of the performances are actually excellent. The elderly duo of Elisha Cook (who played the young punk in Huston's film), and Sylvia Sidney (who also acted alongside Bogart that year in the disappointing The Wagons Roll at Night) remind us how pathetic this film stands next to the film noir greats. A not-excellent, but not-uninteresting, performance comes from Marilu Henner, the female lead, a librarian. For those who would maintain that film librarians are overworked stereotypes, you'd be hard-pressed to work out which boilerplate she's stamped from. She's one of the only original characters, who spends most of the film lounging around Hammett's apartment in a state of partial undress, or visualized in his daydreamed stories as a tough independent woman, holding her own in a world of gangsters, corrupt cops, and mean gumshoes. She drinks whiskey, dries her knickers on a line outside her front door, never talks about (or goes to) work, and is untroubled by the sight of blood. In fact, she's the most Hammett-like character in the whole film. Given the robustness of his fictional creations, one must wonder what on earth the filmmakers thought they were adding by fictionalizing the detective's own life, turning him into a cipher and the stories he created into plywooded melodrama.

Some thoughts on When Worlds Collide (1951)

2012-02-07T21:45:00.001Z

When planetary doom threatens we must build spaceships. Everyone knows this. This is why Roland Emmerich had to confound us and not build spaceships in his roller coaster cataclysm 2012. When Worlds Collide is a much tamer, more drowsy, if more pleasant affair, concerned less with pseudo-science and earth-shattering Earth shattering and more with paternalistic values and aw-shucks romance.

A kindly patriarch scientist and a tetchy capitalist build a spaceship to take 50-odd white people off the dying Earth and, in an act of unintended irony, make a new home on the planet whose passing led to the destruction in the first place. They bring chickens, sheep, hamsters, a dimpled boy (and inevitably his dog, which just as inevitably gives birth to puppies as they land), and a small library of microfilmed books.

A brief scene shows four frumpy women manhandling leather-bound and marble-papered volumes in the weeks before liftoff. Copies of The Bible, 'Anatomy of the Human Body', 'Practical Mathematics', the first volume of an Encyclopaedia, 'Standard Agriculture', 'The Story of Mankind', and a Shakespeare await photography on a bookshelf.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects. 1951 was obviously a bad year for special effects, and a bad year for the Western canon too. Come on people - van Loon's 'The Story of Mankind' was a children's book! There's a remake directed by Stephen Sommers (he of The Mummy) scheduled for release this year. PC dictates that there will be a Qur'an next to The Bible and volumes of Sì Dà Míng Zhù next to Shakespeare on the digitization cradle. Expect something postmodern and self-referential too - probably Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie's 1933 novel on which both films are based.

Sex and death

2012-01-18T21:08:00.000Z

The bodies in the library

Atonement (2007)

What's it about?
Upper-class schoolgirl Briony (Saoirse Ronan) misunderstands a series of encounters between her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and servant's son Robbie (James McAvoy). In her jealousy and confusion she tells a lie about the latter, which leads to the lives of all three being crushed during the early years of the Second World War.

What's it got to do with libraries?
What is it about sex and libraries? Serial controversialist Professor Mary Beard would have us believe that sex in libraries is an almost everyday occurrence. I recently attended a conference at which both keynote speakers hinted at sexual activity in their libraries. Being librarians, they were far too polite to say the S word - the first referred to "hanky-panky", the second to nocturnal activities on library beanbags (some might say that having beanbags in libraries is worse than having sex in them). Searching for the collocation on Google is not something I would advise - the extent of human perversions disturbs even the liberal mind.

Atonement tops Entertainment Weekly's list of 18 Wild Trips to the Library. The piece begins: "A sex scene in a library that is scorching hot? It seems so wrong - and it is - but it's also amazing." The bad writing warns us of the journalistic poverty to follow, for among the other 17 "wild" films are the racy Lorenzo's Oil, A Beautiful Mind and Disney's Beauty and the Beast. The list neglects the only other film I am aware of to feature a library sex scene - Kevin Bacon's Loverboy. Sex is just a hook for a badly-written general feature about libraries and movies.

If libraries are places of quiet and order, sexual activity is an obvious transgression. The first playwrights knew that transgression had dramatic potential, and the inheritance of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides is so deeply embedded in Western culture that we're primed to expect tragedy to follow such transgressive activities. As a classicist Beard knows this - as she knows that the dramatic presentation of Oedipus bonking his mother drew huge audiences to the Athenian theatre, and that library licentiousness will draw readers to her blog too. Atonement's director Joe Wright also knows about hubris, and this association partly explains Cecilia and Robbie's tryst as the turning-point of the film. Wishing for the impossible may also partly explain the "sexy librarian" archetype of popular culture and advertising campaigns, one that Knightley herself seems keen to manipulate, both in her poster for the American Library Association's "Read" campaign, and in a recent fashion shoot for Italian Vogue.

Like some zany version of Cluedo, a transgressive act, by a sexy girl, in a gentleman's library, initially appears to be present in Agatha Christie's 1942 novel The Body in the Library too (filmed in two televisual adaptations, in 1984 and 2004). A blonde is found in Colonel Bantry's library. The villagers of St Mary Mead gossip about the girl's state of undress, and what it might mean. But Christie was a postmodernist ahead of her time. Like Knightley, the girl is actually wearing a satin evening gown. She died, the prurient village doctor tells us, virgo intacta. She's not even blonde and ultimately, she's not even who we think she is. Christie gently mocks village attitudes (the villagers would have tutted at, and delighted in, Atonement), the absurdities of class, and her own use of the private libraries of murderers great and good. Her foreword reveals that the novel is a conscious parody of the detective genre.

Christie is toying with opposites - the body and the library are improbable compliments, as are the village and its countless murderers, the sweet old lady and the detective. She has fun undermining her own genre, softly mocking her life's work, her readers and her previous use of libraries. The library is the natural end of a detective story between the wars, not the start of one. The various would-be murderers are gathered there and arranged like the books on the shelves. The quirky sleuth then picks out the villain through an act of weeding, cataloguing, collection management - Miss Marple is a glorified librarian.

It's interesting to compare and contrast the confluence of the upper classes, libraries and transgression (not only the sexual kind) in Atonement and Christie's novels (and their 30+ film and 80+ television adaptations). Atonement handles this transgression awkwardly. The library scene is more successfully used to convey a mood rather than advance the plot. It is remarkable for its artificiality in an otherwise naturalistic film (the naturalism of the set piece on the Dunkirk seafront is a tour de force). For a film in which two lovers are kept apart (partly) by class, it doesn't use the library in the interesting ways that the space invites. Robbie, defying the role he was born into, has just returned from Cambridge, but this is hardly ever alluded to.

Atonement uses the library as filmatic wallpaper, trading on various cultural associations old and new (the photograph demonstrates the link between private libraries and the upper classes in the window display of an upmarket clothes shop I pass on my walk to work). It focuses on the heavy petting and leaves the heavy lifting and subversion to the echoes of Christie's libraries. In doing so it misses a trick. For the upper classes in Christie's books, the library is an extravagance, and nobody ever seems to take a book off the shelves. Books were costly objects in the nineteenth-century world that so many of her characters inherited. In 1851 the average house servant earned just over £24 pounds annually. At the end of that decade the cloth-bound edition of Darwin's Origin of Species was published at 15 shillings, more than one of those servants earned in a week. The upper classes filled rooms full of expensive books they never read because they could. Cecilia and Robbie have sex there because their sex lives are circumscribed by social convention, so if breaking the rules they may as well do so in the most improbably place.

You end the film cursing Briony and the Germans for keeping these two lovers apart. Its opening scenes have been praised for evoking a pastel-coloured vision of Edwardian England, a place that exists only in storybooks. It glosses over the social history Christie had lived through. And for that is is a much lesser film.

Is it any good?
Am I the only one who feels like I'm being manipulated when reading an Ian McEwan novel? Or that he concentrates too much on the incidental, and neglects his characters? The process of atonement is too excruciatingly cruel here, and too cold. The three leads are too narrow, and Knightley's accent too clipped (this might merely be my dislike of the actress, her character and her class). And the evocation of a lost, idealized England is as fictional as the novel within a novel that is Briony's final, deathbed atonement.

Director: Joe Wright

Written by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan

Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey

Editing: Paul Tothill

Original music: Dario Marianelli

Cast includes James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, Juno Temple, Benedict Cumberbatch

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Some thoughts on The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)

2012-01-07T16:18:00.003Z

The title, necessarily capitalized and at a jaunty angle on posters, suggests that the producers of The Day the Earth Caught Fire would like potential audiences to think their film an alien-invasion romp. It's not. But note the more subtle similarities with the definitional The Day the Earth Stood Still: a warning against nuclear power and the military-political classes; an unexpected intelligence; a hint of the social and scientific changes to come. If The Day the Earth Stood Still prefigured the detonation of the first H-bomb a year later, so The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a year-early preview of both Silent Spring and Sex and the Single Girl.


I'm the damsel in distress. You must be the strong and silent type.

After her release from detention at Her Majesty's expense (her pillowtalk to fallen-hero journalist Edward Judd reveals an imminent apocalypse - hitherto a State secret), Janet Munro is given a sinecure in the library of the Daily Express by the appreciative and paternalistic gentlemen of Fleet Street. Munro was one of Disney's most bright-eyed and bushy-tailed daisy-pickers turned short-haired seductress, a scrappy ingénue with a troubled private life who wore tight sweaters and glasses she didn't need. In a documentary-like film that has newspapermen playing themselves it's essential that Munro fits each of her roles, and for most of the film she represents an interesting mix of Jennifer Snoek-Brown's female librarian archetypes. Unfortunately, the final twenty minutes hollow out her character and undermine the anti-establishment plot threads. Munro turns from an independent single woman into a librarian who falls into her man's arms at the first hint of trouble. The man stops drinking and wise-cracking. The end of days appears to herald a return to patriarchy and cosy 1950s fireplaces. Could this be the producers intervening again, reassuring us that in spite of an ambiguous ending, everything's going to be just fine?

Some thoughts on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

2012-01-02T16:33:00.004Z

Roughly every third page of Stieg Larsson's trilogy of novels somebody offers to makes someone else a cup of coffee. As though the punchy writing and intelligent storytelling weren't enough, Larsson was winning me over by playing on my caffeine addiction too. As a librarian watching David Fincher's film of the first novel, the ever-present shelves of books ought to have provoked a similar warm feeling. But I kept being distracted by the tricks used to condense a complicated book - background television screens to allow past and present events to be explained at the same time; passed-over snippets of text on laptops; photos and timelines neatly stuck to walls; and yes, books shelved on minimalist furniture to give a Scandinavian polish to a Hollywood film.

Henrik Vanger's (Christopher Plummer) lamp-lit personal library, with lots of dark wood and leather-bound volumes, spoke of a cultured patriarch representing, as one character calls him, "the old Sweden". His nephew now runs the family firm and the creepy company archives - ramshackle, oddly lit, a possible repository of secrets - warn us that there's more to this personification of "the new Sweden" than Kartell lamps and Fritz Hansen armchairs.

In a classy piece of bifurcated montage the identity of the killer becomes known to journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and troubled subculture sprite Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) simultaneously. Befitting his status as the salt 'n' peppered newspaperman, Blomkvist interviews an elderly Nazi surrounded by teetering piles of books (a more problematic vision of old Sweden) before discovering the identity of the killer with the carefully organized use of his laptop, photographs, copious notes and ground coffee. Old school journalism. Lisbeth sips on Nescafe and devours a sugary snack, while piecing together seemingly random clues found in the company archive using information retrieval tricks old (a card catalogue) and new (hacking). New school... what exactly? Salander is a problem for both Larsson and Fincher, and a problem that strains the credulity of both visions. Lisbeth isn't just a maladjusted hacker, she's a walking deus ex machina who can be relied upon to say "pwff... whatever" to every problem and deliver every solution just in time. At least she still needs to consult the library.

Some thoughts on The Handmaid's Tale (1990)

2011-12-13T23:16:00.003Z

The Handmaid's Tale is a very bad film, which looks as though it's been directed by some well-meaning chimpanzees who have blagged their way into film school. Its profoundly cheap vision of the future involves dressing paramilitary police in black and giving them (black) visors, while making the stars look like they're performing in an afternoon soap-opera, which is about as unworldly as you can get. Perhaps the plot - environmental disaster; a plague of infertility; civil discontent; rightwing dictatorship; blacks, homos and pinkos deported; nubile women concubined - is the kind of thing that works in a novel. But the film makes it seem so silly that I can't imagine it turning out much better in the book (which I haven't read).

Miranda Richardson is one of the sex slaves, Robert Duvall one of the men-in-black, Faye Dunaway his infertile wife, Aidan Quinn their trusted chauffeur and man-at-arms. The second tries to impregnate the first so that the third can adopt the resulting baby. The third gets jealous of the first, who gets frisky with the second, and then starts carrying on with the fourth. Your classic love quadrangle, all colour-coded so it's easy to follow (Dunaway always wears blue, Richardson red).

Duvall thinks he can win Richardson over with illegal copies of Cosmo and games of scrabble. But she still hates his guts, and she keeps winning! Why? Because before the sex-slave stuff she was a librarian! Does this advance the plot in any way? What plot? Oh yes, the good guys against the bad guys, which how it turns out in the end, with a voice-over lifted straight from The Terminator and Richardson pregnant and safe in a caravan in the wild, rebel-held mountains. How did the rebels get a caravan up a mountain? One among many many questions.

On the side of the angels

2011-12-08T19:04:00.002Z

"This is the place where the plot starts to make sense!"

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

What's it about?

There's no such thing as free will. Mysterious Trilby-wearing men with combination Moleskine notebooks / iPads continually tinker with reality to keep us to a preordained plan. Matt Damon runs around a lot. Emily Blunt looks languorous in a variety of cocktail dresses. Not even the Adjustment Bureau can ward off this Hegelian dialectic. True love is stronger than ersatz fate.

What's it got to do with libraries?
The great Argentine writer, hoaxer, and modernist Jorge Luis Borges famously compared paradise to "a kind of library". I think he would have liked this film of doors transformed into spatial gateways, retro fashion meeting high-end technology, and angels in raincoats. If you've read enough of his stories you could, for a while, imagine that this film was based upon one. But it's too linear to be by Borges, so once again, if you've read enough of his stories you begin to realize that it must be based on something by Philip K. Dick. For this is the author Hollywood always returns to when they want to make high-end, middle-brow science fiction, right? Right.

As a bibliophile and librarian, as a playful author and a man who didn't like straight answers, Borges would have delighted in the idea of angels (who may not be angels) being headquartered in a building which most resembles a library. Most of it is a library, but clever art direction adjusts the filming locations as much as the angels try to adjust our heroes' lives, and a number of dizzying chases are meant to confuse us in any case. Adjustment Bureau HQ is recognizably the New York Public Library however, and not only the reading rooms - many of the corridors, staircases and doors which have rarely, if ever, appeared on screen before, are also from the NYPL Main Branch on Fifth Avenue.

I've written about the NYPL on this blog before, in a post about Breakfast at Tiffany's. I mentioned half-a-dozen other films I knew had been filmed there, not realizing that there were at least two dozen more, as well as lots of TV shows I've never heard of (the library has a list here). As New York is the most filmed city on the planet it's hardly surprising that the NYPL is the world's most filmed library. But who knew, or who remembered, that such greats as Network and such wastes of celluloid as Sliver featured the library too? And why did nobody ever tell me about the library-specific division of the NYPD? This branch of New York's finest get to kick ass and eat donuts... in the library! - a maladjusted librarian's dream (not mine, I hasten to add). Lots of ammunition for future blog posts. I ought to thank the hard-working film scouts, or perhaps the evil Michael Bloomberg, who seems determined to starve the great institution of funds, forcing them to go to Hollywood with a begging bowl.

George Nolfi does the uncanny quite well, especially for a first-time director. But it took me a while realize what was so wrong with the library he depicts. It is missing two significant kinds of object. The Reading Room has no books. Neither the Reading Room nor the Plan Room (where the lives of those of us living in the sublunary world are mapped out in giant white folios) have any librarians. The library seems to have been chosen as a filming location entirely for its aesthetic appeal.

There is nothing wrong with this of course. The angels don't look like they have any leisure time, so they wouldn't need to have the latest Stephen King on the shelves in any case. Nor, given the NYPL's wonderful research collections, would they need to order up an obscure monograph from the stacks, since they already have everything they need on their Moleskine iPads. As for librarians, heaven is probably too well organized to need them, especially with Terence Stamp in charge. I, for one, hope that heaven isn't too much like a library. It would feel too much like work. But I am hoping that it might be a little bit like New York.

Is it any good?

It's probably difficult to make a bad film when you've got a Philip K. Dick story converted into a pacey script. But this isn't enough to make a good film. There's something really phony about The Adjustment Bureau. And saccharine. And it doesn't entirely make sense. This makes it sounds just like Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's not. But just like film versions of Truman Capote, movies based on Philip K. Dick stories generally promise more than they deliver.

Director: George Nolfi

Written by George Nolfi, based on a story by Philip K. Dick

Cinematography: John Toll

Editing: Jay Rabinowitz

Original music: Thomas Newman

Cast includes Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Terence Stamp, Michael Kelly, Anthony Mackie, John Slattery

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Some thoughts on the A-Team ("Pros and Cons", 1983; 2010)

2011-11-22T20:40:00.006Z

Joe Carnahan's witless update of The A-Team is a sad mistake, a badly-acted film of needless spectacle and inconsequentia, held together by a patchwork of purposeless explosions. The filmmakers evidently think us morons, and hope we won't wonder why Cologne cathedral and the American Embassy are located in Frankfurt. Do they really expect us to believe that you can print off a billion dollars with a dozen metal printing plates? That a tank can fall 20,000 feet into a lake and drive out? That a cargo ship can get from the eastern Atlantic to Los Angeles in less than two days?

A library book provides the convoluted device to free impresario Hannibal from the stockade. A deus ex machina is provided in the form of a fumus ex libro - his weekend's reading has a cigar hidden in the spine. It's laced with poison, so that the colonel can mimic death, escape the flames of the prison crematorium, steal a technician's coat, and walk straight out. Every American soldier seems to know Hannibal on sight - except for those who have held him in captivity for six months presumably.

The writer of this rubbish probably wasn't aware that, coincidentally, the only library book to feature in the television series was also used in a prison-bust-out story. In an early episode Hannibal, BA, and Murdock get themselves thrown into a rural slammer to save one of BA's pals from a vicious warden. Face pretends to be an Ivy League professor sent by the US Senate to investigate prison policy. The book, with Face's picture somehow transposed onto the dust-jacket, is his calling card. Yes, this is also implausible and not done particularly well (strangely for a library book, it lacks labels and stamps), but the acting is charming, the scripting is clever, the story proceeds along a clear, even thread, and the A-Team save the day without resorting to high-end pyrotechnics, moral flim-flam, or ladles of irony.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, librarian

2011-10-26T19:20:00.006+01:00

Benedict Cumberbatch hunts the archives to find
out why everything in this film is brown

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

What's it about?

M16 grandee George Smiley is forced into retirement following a disastrous misadventure behind the Iron Curtain. He sets out to discover why the mission failed, and unmasks a Soviet agent at the heart of British intelligence.

What's it got to do with libraries?
Comparing books to films is a mug's game. 'Not as good as the book' is one of my least favourite sentences. It's a platitudinous and mindless statement, since meaningful comparison is made nigh-impossible by the radically different ways books and films are produced and consumed. But 'not as good as the previous version' is a good sentence, because it's something you can have a conversation about - comparing a story told on film with the same story told in another film is meaningful because of simple mechanics.

Clever directors are aware of both traps and possibilities. J.J. Abrams' Star Trek was very different from the previous Star Treks, but his re-imagining was complemented by knowing winks at his audience. Abrams was able to construct an implausible universe more easily by transplanting his story into a priori space. Less talented directors run into trouble when they brush against a tale previously told (it helped Abrams that his is the best of the 11 films about the Starship Enterprise). Sometimes there's no room left for reinvention. Brandon Routh never had a hope of stepping into Christopher Reeve's red boots in the folly of Superman Returns. Gus van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of Psycho I simply don't understand.

When Tomas Alfredson was chosen to create a new version/vision of John le Carré's 1974 novel he was slightly more free than other recent rebooters. A seven-part BBC television production had already brought the story to screen. But that screen was smaller, the production (necessarily) episodic. Alfredson had a little more wriggle-room, but not much.

The publicity people at StudioCanal (Alfredson's producers) were obviously aware of the advantages and pitfalls of cinematic recycling. And so they based their marketing strategy on a single conceit - 'this is not a remake'. The mantra was an ingenious publicity ploy, but it resembled the clichéd denials of a murderer who has not yet been told that a killing has taken place. It continually reminded eager audiences of a world that had already been visualized and a set of maladjusted spies we were already familiar with (even if we hadn't seen the earlier film - for simplicity's sake I'm going to call it a film - we knew that these secret agents had pre-existing movieland reality). It also helped lazy reviewers, who were given their opening two paragraphs. Have you read a review of this film that doesn't reference Alec Guinness in the first 100 words?

The denials are a nonsense of course. A nonsense firstly, paradoxically, in the explicit refashioning of certain scenes to call attention to the differences between the two versions. We might call this the Abrams conceit - reminding audiences, by emphasizing unimportant differences, of an earlier production. Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opens in Budapest, not in Czechoslovakia, using an alternatively exotic Warsaw Pact arena as though to emphasize, from the start, distinctions between 1979 and 2011. The open-plan interior and exterior spaces of MI6 headquarters are the visual antithesis to the cramped and cloistered corridors and paper-strewn offices of 1979. Even the title differs - the commas have been removed.

But after the first act we segue into familiar territory. The story proceeds in almost exactly the same fashion as the 1979 version, but using various visual devices to cut corners, and developing characters by way of facial expressions instead of dialogue (315 minutes must be reduced to 127). The props are the same, the clothes are the same. The words spoken are the same words, with a few choice expletives thrown in. The grimy London streets are the same grimy London streets. But it feels like a reimagining, it feels like a simulacrum of 1974. Alfredson tries too hard to present an original visual mood, to impose an auteuresque patina, to generate a knowing authenticity, and he slips into pastiche and trivial error. Look carefully and you can see modern cars on the streets of Paris and Istanbul. Drunken attendees at the MI6 Christmas party sing the version of the Soviet National Anthem written in 1977.

Then there's Gary Oldman's excellent performance (nearly all the performances are excellent) as George Smiley. As an interpretation of Alec Guinness interpreting George Smiley it is astonishing. Oldman claims he based his voice and mannerisms on John le Carré's. The publicity people probably had a hand in that claim too.

When Alfredson tries to do something different he fumbles. Minor variations from the earlier plot mostly involve more explicit sex and violence. One particularly horrific murder is used to demonstrate the callousness of Smiley's Soviet arch-enemy Karla (in doing so dynamiting other suggestions of moral ambiguity). But by refusing to show Karla on screen the audience end being implicated in the slaying, and the too-long shot of the gore is physically repulsing, to no end. Other directorial detours wind up as ambitious but obtrusive experiments in cinematography. These digressions result in a film of jarring change and uneven pace.

So what's it got to do with libraries? In my earlier post about the 1979 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I described Peter Guillam's brief foray into the MI6 library to swipe some top-secret folders. The same thing happens in the 2011 version, in the same order, and with most of the same dialogue. But the library is as different as can be. In contrast to the cramped room of untidy corners and blue-tac crumbs, we get three Victorian metal galleries overlooking a large void. Instead of sharp natural light we get fluorescent and shadows. The female librarian is replaced by a man. The same events, told in the same way, the foreground the same but the background in negative.

I'm looking out at the Bodleian Library as I write this, my view an almost exact reproduction of the photograph shown under the credits at the end of the television serial (project the camera back 30 metres and it would be sitting where I sit). Alec Guinness' Smiley walked through the Bodleian's courtyard when visiting another spy forced into retirement. The closing credits showed the edge of the Bodleian and its Radcliffe Camera reading room. It's a pity that Alfredson's smudgy vision of 1970s Britain didn't leave room for a smart visual comment about the infiltration of the British establishment by Oxbridge values, standards, flaws, and ultimately, hinting at the identity of the spy, relationships.

Is it any good?

The charismatic performances cannot disguise the jagged pace, the annoying use of montage, the failure to engage the audience. It's an interesting visual experiment, but if you want a gripping and human spy thriller, watch the television serial instead.

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Written by Bridget O'Connor, Peter Straughan, based on the novel by John le Carré

Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema

Editing: Dino Jonsäter

Original music: Alberto Iglesias

Cast includes Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ciarán Hinds, David Dencik

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Some thoughts on The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

2011-10-20T21:53:00.004+01:00

Pictures of Marilyn Monroe may sell DVDs, but her charming and capable performance in The Asphalt Jungle isn't the best reason to watch this noir thriller. She's too new to movies here, outclassed by Jean Hagen (best known for playing Lena Lamont in Singin' in the Rain) and a sympathetic gang of male criminals. Two actors dominate. A haystack hoodlum played by marine / communist / spy / sailor / novelist Sterling Hayden provides the disheveled muscle for a jewel robbery. Fellow communist Sam Jaffe's "Doc" Riefenschneider plays the caper-devising, Homburg-wearing criminal genius straight out of prison, hungry for safecracking and girl-chasing.

Two years after directing this film John Huston ran away to Ireland to escape Joseph McCarthy's scrutiny (a strange choice - Ireland was pretty much a far-right theocracy at the time). With Huston's history, with a Jew in the role of a German, and with a crooked policeman and two-timing lawyer as the real bad guys, it would be easy to hypothesize strands of subversion here. This, I think, would be a mistake. The actors are fully capable of imbuing their characters with shades of grey without directorial help - Huston's touch remains light.

Likewise, we shouldn't read too much into Riefenschneider's confession that he worked as a librarian in the slammer. The inmate-librarian is a plot device in Escape from Alcatraz and a launchpad for all kinds of moral fluff in The Shawshank Redemption (as elsewhere - personally I think there are are few things more loathsome in cinema than redemption through books). In Riefenschneider's case it shows his attention to detail and his wilyness, the head-below-the-parapet-and-buried-in-refill-pad attitude that lets him plan almost perfect capers. For as fans of the sub-genre know, there's no such thing as a perfect caper.

Some thoughts on The Ninth Gate (1999)

2011-10-05T19:26:00.002+01:00

What exactly does double-dealing antiquarian bookseller Johnny Depp do with his ill-gotten gains? He claims to be interested in nothing but money, but wears only one outfit, drives no car, and has a small, badly-furnished New York apartment. He can't spend that much on cigarettes and whiskey, can he?

Is he aware of the discontinuity? Is he having an existential crisis? Is that why, wandering over Iberia and France viewing private libraries, he allows himself to be ravished, first by a Satanist widow, and then by a witch? Is this meant to be a veiled critique of private property, of sex-relations, or consumerism, disguised as a sub-Dan Brown suspense thriller? Am I missing something?

How does Depp know so much about rare books anyway? I can't count how many times he rattles off something like "...the 1578 London copy of Magister Gregorious, with woodcuts by Alfonsus... and tooling by a Maastricht craftsman, presumably Stefan d'Agincourt..." Oh I see Mr Polanski, Johnny knows this stuff because he flicks through old books listening to the sound the pages make. Because that's what rare books specialists do.

The saddest thing for a librarian is the obvious care taken in the gathering of genuinely rare books for the camera, only for their interesting features to be abused, as the careful dialogue is also debased, by a director's slow deconstruction of his own promise, and an absurd denouement. "Mumbo jumbo, mumbo jumbo, MUMBO JUMBO" booms Frank Langella as he crashes a storybook Satanic ritual (Latin chants, black capes, high ceilings), before attempting to raise part-time book-engraver Lucifer. Yes Frank, it most certainly is.

Some thoughts on Peeping Tom (1960)

2011-09-21T22:03:00.002+01:00

Karlheinz Böhm's stuck in an auto-erotic Freudian cinematographic nightmare, traipsing around a grimy London with a wind-up Bell and Howell 16mm in an effort to understand his father's perversions. Various prostitutes and movie-starlets with six-inch waists fall victim to his murderous studies until he appears to find a chance of redemption in a dainty redheaded children's librarian with a Tiresias-like mother, the only character to recognize that her daughter's beau is actually a nutcase.

It's all allegorical, and none too subtle, a commentary on the relationship between cinema and its audience. By implicating the cinemagoer in Böhm's crimes,director Michael Powell inspired self-loathing in his viewers, thereby dynamiting his own career (so the story goes). Because of this unprecedented rulebreaking, Roger Ebert puts Peeping Tom on his list of "Great Movies", while Martin Scorsese, Powell's greatest modern propagandist, believes that it shows everything that can be shown about directing. But I don't see it. There's too much of the voyeuristic misogyny of Hitchcock here (similar in many ways, Psycho was released only a few months later). Maybe this is my problem... I don't really get Hitchcock either.

At least the library, shown for all of three seconds, is interesting. In reality a concrete secondary modern school next to crumbling towerblocks in a rundown part of north London, it is an eyesore. The heroine never speaks of it. She wants to be an author, reminding us that for many librarians, their job is just a job, and that much of librarianship can be pedestrian and dull. Libraries can also places that, contrary to Borges' association between libraries and paradise, one might sometimes dream of escaping from.

Some thoughts on Saturday Color Carnival: The Ernie Kovacs Show, aka The Silent Show, aka Eugene, (1957; 1961)

2011-08-27T10:06:00.002+01:00

Ernie Kovacs was a visually experimental physical comic who achieved huge popularity before his early death in 1962. He was a talented writer, director, and performer, but he was also lucky, appearing at a time when television was dominated by aging vaudeville stars and radio comics, leaving a space for his surreal improvisation and technical innovation. He would have been too leftfield for the conservative rating-chasers who took over the networks in the late 1960s.

His part-spontaneous, part-scripted library scene is a typical routine. A gentleman's club library provides a setting for a series of visual and sound gags by his character Eugene, a bumbling accidental existentialist. Kovacs finishes with his most famous stunt - a gravity-defying lunch, in which a cornucopia of fruit and a flask of milk defeat the laws of physics and fly sideways off a (library) table.

Kovacs plays the act silently (Buster Keaton was his most significant influence), though his clothes, shoes, lunchbox and miniature record-player all continually rattle, hum, squelch and groan. The library provides an added layer of incongruity, while also allowing high and low cultures to intermingle to comedic effect - unsurprisingly, Kovacs would later be acknowledged as an inspiration by the comedians of Monty Python.

Some thoughts on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979)

2011-08-15T20:45:00.005+01:00

One of the few disappointments during the year Russian Dinosaur and I spent in Siberia was the abject failure of MI6, the CIA, KGB, DGSE or Mossad to attempt to recruit me as a spy. Being Irish was probably a drawback, and some of my political views aren't exactly mainstream. But we were living 70 km from the centre of Russia's nuclear weapons industry. And only 100 metres from the regional headquarters of the secret police - surely that would have been worth something to somebody? Two years later, at the end of my year as a trainee librarian, lots of library/information science jobs were advertised by Britain's secret services. Once again my nationality disqualified me.

There isn't exactly a traditional library in the original television production of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Early in the series the various three-piece-suited sociopathic spymasters have a conversation about creating one to protect information gathered by their high-level Moscow source. Later, Smiley's inside man Peter Guillam steals a folder from MI6's library-like archive repository. Proponents of the theory that the librarian archetype is always negatively portrayed on-screen (an interpretation I don't subscribe to) will find rich pickings here. The hunched, ugly, frumpy and frowning librarian with glasses the size of saucers keeps a watchful eye behind a table littered with library stamps and ledgers (a more attractive encardiganed blonde shelves folders). The regulations tacked to the back of the door are torn, the light is dim, the air is dusty. And you can steal top-secret folders, just like that.

Which just goes to show that they need highly-trained, motivated, and talented people if the Magna Carta, parliamentary democracy, the rule-of-law and all that are to be properly protected. And that this bottom-of-the-barrel, Brits-only policy only puts the security of the world at risk. Any secret service wishing to employ my skills are advised to contact me immediately to remedy this. You presumably know where I live.

If you want to read my thoughts on the 2011 film version of Le Carré's book, in which I compare the two versions from various perspectives (including the library angle), follow the link on the left, or click here.

Some thoughts on Conan the Barbarian (1982, 2011) & UHF (1989)

2011-07-31T17:18:00.002+01:00

Like every good cinephile I hate a good Sword & Sorcery movie. It's up there beside the romantic comedy as a genre to avoid (though I'd rather watch Willow or Red Sonja ten times over than have to sit through ten minutes of a Jennifer Aniston flick). But Conan the Barbarian is different, and the reasons why it's different are the reasons why I'm baffled to see it remade.

Reviews of the original, first, and best Conan are generally extreme - I side with the gushingly positive ones. Like Roger Ebert's, who calls Conan 'a very nearly perfect visualization... a triumph of production design, set decoration, special effects and makeup.' It's also wonderfully entertaining, low-brow, stylish, perfectly-cast fluff that uses the melodramatic conventions of cinema to tell a revenge story. It doesn't take itself too seriously but manages to avoid irony (which would spoil it). The conditions and people who brought it to the screen are idiosyncratic and unique. Unique films ought not to be remade.

There's no library in Conan. It's set in the pre-classical 'Hyborian Age of Man', when they didn't even have books. But a treasure-seeker for an unexpected rhyme, 'Weird' Al Jankovic used the character for what now seems an obvious gag... Conan the librarian. Jankovic's 1989 comedy UHF features a trailer for a movie to be screened on the television station he's taken over. Wake up Hollywood - films about giant axe-wielding librarians are a better investment than gloomy, bloody, CGI-heavy remakes!

Some thoughts on The Ipcress File (1965)

2011-07-27T21:48:00.003+01:00

Sold as an antidote to the early Bond films, this spy thriller pits Michael Caine against some brainwashing Albanians who spend their time hanging around the Royal Albert Hall studying, listening to marching music, and killing Her Majesty's secret agents. Fond of fistfights and "birds", we're meant to think Caine is unlike Bond because he's working class. Nonsense! With a West End flat and a penchant for extreme violence and freshly-ground coffee peculiar for the mid-1960s, the character borrows various inclinations from Ian Fleming's novelistic mouchard.

Caine plays the role brilliantly, but the rest of the cast (Gordon Jackson excepted) are forgettable and resemble nothing so much as the ensemble of a situation comedy trying to look serious. And then there's the contrived camerawork - filming from wonky angles and scenes shot from under someone's elbow or through a telephone box. It's meant to be swinging and countercultural I suppose, but it looks contrived to me.

There's an uncanny confrontation in a library. Caine sits across from the Albanian malin génie and at a volume unsuited to the location asks his nemesis awkward questions. Though no-one gives them a second glance, Bluejay (the baddie) tells Caine to shush (a frustrated librarian?). The scene was filmed in the old Science Museum Library in the Royal College of Science building, now part of Imperial College.

Some thoughts on Sliders ("Eggheads", 1995)

2011-07-16T15:06:00.001+01:00

Sliders was a derivative and formulaic American sci-fi series that started with some promise but quickly ran out of ideas. Essentially a pumped-up version of Quantum Leap (the characters "slid" though parallel universes rather than through time), it had none of the charm and humanity of its predecessor. In the first and second series it tried to juggle the tropes of alternative history and alternative social norms, but often dropped the ball. In the third series, a militaristic race of primates called Kromaggs (favourite food: human eyes) were introduced in a story arc. Philip K. Dick it wasn't.

In an early episode, sandwiched between a world where the summer of love never ended and the inevitable episode in which sex-roles were reversed, the four characters slide into a world where intellectuals are treated like sports stars. Instead of singing about their sexual exploits and shooting people, this world's rappers promote library attendance. The song's quite good actually. Makes you wonder why there isn't more hip-hop about libraries. True to form our world's rappers prefer to mention library sex (Ludacris, "What's your fantasy"), or rhyme about libraries in a song about machine-guns (Wu-Tang Clan, "Uzi"). At least NaS ("Family") advises his "thugs in the prisonyard... to hit the law library" and Canibus ("RIP iz alive") seems to want to substitute pimping for book-stamping: "When I'm 30 years old, I'ma quit ryhmin, collect my own catalogue and open up a library".

Some thoughts on Zardoz (1974)

2011-07-11T21:58:00.002+01:00

Having rewatched some of his films recently I've finally realized that John Boorman is a very mediocre director, whose great films (there are at least four), are driven entirely by great performances. Left to his own devices with a limp cast, things go horribly wrong. Not even the skimpy wool and silk outfits on the decorous Charlotte Rampling can save this one, nor the apparition of Sean Connery riding around Wicklow in a red nappy. Not even the hinge in the creaky plot which follows from the discovery Connery makes in a library.

Connery plays the "Brutal" Zed, who rapes, pillages, and murders his way across a post-apocalyptic world in the service (though he doesn't know it) of the "Immortals" and their God Zardoz, a flying stone head. Zed kills the pilot of the head (later revealed as Zardoz himself), infiltrates the "Vortex", where the Immortals live a dull utopian life, and finally destroys them. The film is long and pretentious, if a visually stimulating attentive examination of the philosophy of life (though its conclusions are either banal or nonsensical).

Zardoz plays with both Freudian and Hegelian concepts of power. Under hyponosis Zed reveals that he is the product of a eugenic project devised by Zardoz himself. Zardoz, merely one of the Immortals in fancy dress, had taught Zed to read by means of selective pillaging and magic tricks involving books. He makes the (deliberate?) mistake of exposing Zed to the Wonderful WiZARD of OZ. Zed, smarter than he looks, joins up the dots, and the destruction of the Vortex is his long-drawn out revenge against the smokescreens and puppetry. A ruined library provides the catalyst for destroying the last outpost of civilization, a mumbled metaphor for this zany, psychedelic adult fairy-story.

"We have no secrets from our readers"

2011-06-16T20:45:00.002+01:00

Books about rosebuds are shelved at classmark 635.93

Citizen Kane (1941)

What's it about?

Filthy rich media-mogul Charles Foster Kane dies. Reporters comb his eventful and controversial life in an effort to find the meaning behind his last word - Rosebud.

What's it got to do with libraries?

Citizen Kane stitches together a contemporary story with self-referential flashbacks in a series of contradictory episodes whose ambition is matched by their technical brilliance. In the second of five attempts to discover the identity of Rosebud reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) visits the "Thatcher Memorial Library" to review the unpublished memoirs of Kane's former guardian. A stern librarian (Georgia Backus) leads Thompson into a mausoleum-like reading room, arranges for him to view the manuscript, and gives strict instructions on which pages he may view.

The library has no visible shelves. The manuscript is stored in a safe. The librarian is perhaps the most severe representation of the profession ever projected onto a cinema screen. Unsurprisingly, library writers have denounced the scene. Phrases such as "the world's meanest archivist" and "a typically negative view of librarians" pepper online discussions. A blogger has written: "I watched Citizen Kane for the first time with a librarian and she was quick to point out how librarians are erroneously depicted in popular culture".

But the issue-desk critics have entirely missed the point. They have overlooked Welles' subversiveness and his expressionistic filmmaking. They have ignored the fact that, unlike the librarian encountered by Woodward and Bernstein, Backus grants access to the library's most treasured document under the same conditions that every good librarian would impose. The reporter is watched, and his time with the manuscript is limited - yet he is allowed to read it.

Secondly, and remarkably, Backus is untypical of other screen librarians because she plays the character as a lesbian (David Lugowski uses her performance as a launchpad to "queer" the entire film). She is not the enbunned, horn-rimmed, cardigan wearing Plain Jane of librarians' ire. She is masculine, strong, and domineering, with an Annie Lennox dress-sense forty years before the Eurythmics (and yes, I know that Annie Lennox isn't gay). She is completely in charge of her collection, and completely in control of the situation. She is an empowering and emancipatory figure. She is mean, but you have to be a little mean to be a good librarian.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the library is not a meant to be understood as a library at all. It is a deliberately indicated episode in a movie (note the silhouette of the camera lens on the closing library door). Negotiating the borders between drama, melodrama, and parody, Citizen Kane doesn't need any of the associations a real library would bring - it needs a room in which a book can be opened. It doesn't need a sultry blonde to distract the camera, nor a spinster for the audience to snigger at. The vault, the library's thick walls, and the librarian's strictness all point to an act of uncovering, and the audacity of Gregg Toland's lighting tricks us into expecting a revelation. The empty table and the blank room are used as tabulae rasae to set up the flashback. Welles is toying with us (what, after all, is Rosebud but a toy?).

Is it any good?

Is Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made, as so many lists suggest? The question is impossible to answer, because for most people the question has already been answered before they've even seen the film (possibly the reason why so many haven't actually seen it). I can think of films I'd rather watch. But there are few others that impress me so, nor any that have been so influential. The ceiling shots, the deep focus, the structure, the overlapping sound tracks - these had been used before, but never in such combination. Nor, I think, has there ever been a film that offers such a cinematic education. I re-watched the library scene in order to write this post, but couldn't stop there - Kane sucks you in. It is endlessly rewarding.

Director: Orson Welles

Written by Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz

Cinematography: Gregg Toland

Editing: Robert Wise

Original music: Bernard Herrmann

Cast includes Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, Sonya Wagner, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane

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Some thoughts on Star Trek ("All Our Yesterdays", 1969)

2011-06-07T21:37:00.004+01:00

The future depicted in the Star Trek franchise is a depressing place for fans of libraries. Not only are there few books in either digital or analogue form, there is remarkably little text. It's a wonder the citizens of the Federation still know how to read in a galaxy of holodecks, tricorders and brightly-lit buttons.

The penultimate episode of the original series provides a neat example. Kirk, Bones and Spock land on a planet whose old chestnut sun "is about to go nova". Mr Atoz (A to Z - get it?), the planet's only remaining resident, guards a library of 20,000 discs. An intransigent and distrustful librarian, Atoz has used the discs and "the Atavachron" to send everyone else back into the past. Inevitably, in a hail of pink and yellow light, our three heroes accidentally get sent back too. Reversing the usual order, Kirk gets transported to a foppish version of Restoration England, while Spock and Bones end up sharing a prehistoric cavern with a glossy cave-girl. Following adventure and seduction they return, and Scotty beams them out with seconds to spare.

A smug librarian, who has connived with a tyrant to imprison people in antiquity against their will, on a dying planet. A library that literally transports people back in time, as the last remaining room on a dying world. Not exactly a forward-thinking vision of libraries or librarians. Captain Picard, twenty-five years and many stardates later, causes widespread bemusement on his Enterprise for his fondness for Shakespeare, Joyce and Conan Doyle. A renaissance man on a ship of fools - poor Jean-Luc!

Some thoughts on Timecop (1994)

2011-05-24T19:49:00.006+01:00

Here's a piece of movie trivia to astonish your friends with... not one of Jean-Claude van Damme's (42) films features a library or librarian. So what? Firstly, as this blog attempts to demonstrate, libraries and librarians have roles in many films, so the absence of one in van Damme's oeuvre is statistically unlikely. Secondly, the librarian as action hero is an obvious cinematic joke (see my post about The Librarian). In the truly awful Demolition Man, which van Damme turned down, Sandra Bullock tells a reanimated Sylvester Stallone (an oxymoron?) about the Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. The idea of Schwarzenegger as librarian is toyed with by Al Jankovic in UHF. Jet Li actually plays a librarian in Black Mask.

But van Damme is different. Unlike Schwarzenegger he cannot act (to be fair to Schwarzenegger, he can act, though his range is limited). Unlike Stallone he is not a big man (he is only 5'9"). More than any action hero he sometimes comes close to being an everyman (though never during the arrogant bluster of his cocaine-fueled years 1993-1998, the subject of introspection in JCVD). The librarian joke would fall flat.In any case there's no need to make jokes about van Damme and libraries, because there's already a van Damme library in Paris. And Timecop? In this slick sci-fi entertainment his wife is played by Mia Sara, the love interest for alcoholic librarian Ned Beatty in thriller Shadows in the Storm. Tenuous, I know, but I needed to maintain the format...

Some thoughts on Foul Play (1978)

2011-05-20T08:14:00.004+01:00

It isn't easy being a Colin Higgins who writes about film. Someone got there with my name first, someone far more talented. The other Colin Higgins is most famous for writing and producing the existentialist comedy Harold and Maude. Before his tragically early death from AIDS in 1988 he wrote six more films, three of which he directed. Foul Play is probably the funniest of the three, the only one not to feature Dolly Parton, and the only one with a librarian as a principal character.

Goldie Hawn plays the librarian and Chevy Chase a cop in this lighthearted comedy thriller. A series of improbable circumstances bring them together to prevent the assassination of the Pope - I won't try to explain it any further. There are many cinematic nods and in-jokes (a trenchcoated Brian Dennehy is even cast as Chase's partner, his 7,000th film as a crumpled policeman). We are continually reminded of the most famous San Francisco film, Vertigo. Higgins's pacing, like Hitchcock's is expertly done.

Hawn's workplace provides an evocative backdrop for a couple of fun scenes. In one she is attacked by a killer albino (perhaps Dan Brown was watching), in another a sex-obsessed colleague gives Hawn a variety of self-defense tools and one-liners, though no puns about libraries, alas! Librarianship here is little more than a hook for Hawn's spinsterdom though - it doesn't make sense for an attractive blonde in her early thirties to be single... unless she's a librarian! The video gives some indication of the subversiveness of Higgins's comed.

Some thoughts on The Fimbles (2002-04)

2011-05-14T13:10:00.006+01:00

There aren't many librarians on children's television, especially not fluffy ones. But the BBC's The Fimbles was no ordinary show. The Fimbles - Fimbo, Florrie, and Baby Pom, look like large-nosed woolly skittles. They live in a psychedelic dream-world called Fimble Valley. Among their friends are a noisy and flippant frog called Rockit, a spherical pink bird called Bessie, and a green and purple Welsh mole called Roly Mo.

Roly Mo is a tidy, conscientious, intellectual counterpoint to the dreamy and messy Fimbles. In every episode he tells them a story from his subterranean library, the best of which combine the crypto-communist subversion of Sesame Street with light-hearted, nonsensical plots beloved of earlier BBC shows like The Teletubbies and Bill and Ben. He precedes every story with a lullaby to his love of books - "When you take a look, inside a book / Who knows what you might see / When you take a look, inside a book, it's fun as fun can be..." Despite the heaving shelves, Roly always seems to read from the same book. This might have something to do with his absentmindedness - despite the chuckling uncle demeanour, one blogger has suggested that his idiosyncratic behaviour might be due to a severe party-lifestyle in his youth. After The Fimbles ended Roly got his own show, but fame didn't suit him. He stopped rolling, his stories became repetitive, and the show was canceled after a year.

The sharp-eyed people at the BBC have made sure that all videos of The Fimbles and The Roly Mo Show have been purged from the internet. Yet they have left one of the most amazing pieces of "found" modern art I've ever encountered, a propinquitous miracle of breakbeat, a television, and a small child. Enjoy (please give it at least 35 seconds).

Some thoughts on Rollerball (1975)

2011-05-10T19:09:00.002+01:00

What's a muscular sports-star in a post-apocalyptic corporatist utopia to do when he's told by an executive to retire? Go to the library to dig up some dirt ("read up on some stuff", as our hero says) of course!

Rollerball's an odd sci-fi thriller, stylish if highly derivative of Kubrick. In a jejune future, a dozen inoffensive corporations have rid the world of want. They provide both bread and circus - rollerball. Players are meant to die young, and be indivisible from their team. But James Caan, huffing around like a wooden Brando, becomes a hero to millions of fans worldwide - his stamina and staying power (presumably) threaten the cartel.

Caan goes to the library to try to understand what's going on. Outside it looks like an inverted mushroom. Inside it looks like a shopping centre. A clerk who resembles one of Isaac Asimov's sexier robots tells him that books have been summarized and replaced by computers. "So what you're telling me is that this isn't a real library and you're not a real librarian!" he says to her, which she takes quite well (maybe she thinks of herself more as an "information professional"). Later Caan goes to Geneva, home of the largest data-centre, to ask questions of the largest book-munching computer. He finds a glass cube of water bubbling away, watched over by well-meaning eggheads. Both the aqua-computer and its minders appear to be mad.

Like the computer, there's something deep and important bubbling under the surface here. The film could be about power and responsibility, the individual and society, freedom and tyranny, pleasure and politics. Instead it's about lots of very large men on rollerskates thumping one another.

Some thoughts on The Twilight Zone ("The Obsolete Man", 1961)

2011-05-05T20:49:00.005+01:00

Have you noticed that there are some creepy people working in libraries? No surprise then that there's a Twilight Zone episode with a librarian as the main character. In final episode of the second series, the very uncreepy and very excellent Burgess Meredith plays "The Obsolete Man", a librarian condemned to death in a dystopic totalitarian state. In a teleplay that echoes both The Trial and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Meredith meets his end with forbearance, stoicism and resignation (traits of the librarian?) while, oddly for his profession, criticizing the State for being practitioners of indexing and classification.

The extraordinarily clear camerawork and Meredith's quietly brilliant performance (half Kansas farmer, half pious Everyman) is complemented by some sharp writing in an otherwise hokey script. In his oddly compelling judgment, a servant of the State condemns the librarian as "a dealer in books and two-cent fines and pamphlets and closed stacks and the musty insides of a language factory that spews out meaningless words on an assembly line; words... that have no substance, no dimension, like air, like the wind, like a vacuum that you make believe has an existence by scribbling index numbers on little cards." It hurts the librarian in us all. This librarian-hater is himself condemned at the episode's end, and torn to pieces by some overzealous citizens who look like demented escapees from a Broadway dance troupe. Let that be a lesson to enemies of the library everywhere.

"Sixteen years of College, all those fancy degrees... what are you doing?" -- "Librarian" -- "Librarian?!?"

2011-05-01T13:56:00.006+01:00

We are not going to pay our library fines!

The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (2004)

What's it about?

Overachieving perpetual student Flynn Carson (played by Noah Wyle) is hired as "The Librarian" by the mysterious Metropolitan Public Library. In addition to books, the Library holds various mystical treasures, one of which, the Spear of Destiny, is purloined by a gang of kung-fu heavies. Flynn sets off to the Amazon in pursuit of the spear, and the gang leader...

What's it got to do with libraries?

It's about a librarian. He's a kind of a superhero! Is this not enough?

I continue to be amazed at how few librarians this side of the pond have actually seen the three Librarian films. Perhaps my American readers have watched these made for television movies, but in Europe the series is almost unknown.

The use of a librarian is an action-hero is, of course, part of the situation comedy. Someone obviously thought it a funny idea – you can imagine the conversation taking place in a Hollywood bar. “Hey Jack, let’s make a jokey action adventure movie – what kind of person would look funniest as an action hero?” “Um, I don’t know Mike, a librarian?” Uproarious laughter. But then Jack turns to Mike – “You know, that might just work!”

While pandering to the idea that librarians are passive, shy, antisocial, and not particularly handy sharpshooters or kickboxers, the film also plays with positive views of the library and librarian. The librarian as quick-witted brainbox and guardian of wisdom. The library as storehouse of myth; a historic institution with roots in the ancient world. The library of Alexandria (though probably no longer in existence) was founded over three hundred years before the Spear of Destiny pierced the side of Christ. The Metropolitan Public Library now guards this spear – fixing its allegiance to Judeo-Christian culture, but also to the Roman Empire, in whose service the spear was made. The spear passed through the hands of a role call of ambiguous European rulers (Charlemagne, Napoleon, though much less ambiguously, Hitler). Now missing, it must be rescued from South America, and finally the Himalayas, by a librarian with a recent doctorate in Egyptology. Old World, New World, the Oriental Other, good and evil – the library binds them all together. It is the timeless world institution par excellence.

And surely Flynn Carson is the librarian we all want to be. I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was a child (the fault of Indiana Jones). I ended up as a librarian. But look – Flynn Carson is a librarian and he still kicks ass! He has twenty-two degrees, spends too much time reading, has trouble with women, and still lives with his mother. But he saves the world. There’s something of Frodo about him – plucked from obscurity on a quest for an object that only he can be trusted to handle.

And the other four librarians? His bodyguard/assistant Nicole Noone, a charmingly misanthropic, machete-wielding adventuress, whose face, we are told, is a perfect expression of the golden mean (though she is no ordinary Hollywood beauty). Library administrator Charlene, with her power-suit, her ballroom office, her firmness and efficiency… her three cats (calm down librarians, this movie has to play for laughs to the non-librarian audience too). Judson, himself The Librarian in the distant past, world-weary and innocuous, but also a seventy-something judo-master and ex-Marine. And the film’s baddie, played by a sadly wooden Kyle MacLachan, Flynn’s predecessor as The Librarian, whose ambition is to rule the world. The film’s premise is that librarians are objects of fun, but what fun this cast of librarians are.

Is it any good?

People, this film is brilliant. It is escapist, nonsensical fluff, but its lightheartedness and tongue-in-cheek playfulness make it great Sunday afternoon material. Bob Newhart, who plays Judson, is famously one of America's finest deadpan comics, but to those who only know Wyle as ER's troubled heartthrob, his genius for slapstick will be a revelation. There are two sequels, which for me are less satisfactory, as they can no longer toy with Flynn’s entry into the profession. But no other movies so clearly show that, in Flynn Carson’s words “being a librarian is actually a pretty cool job.”

Director: Peter Winther

Written by David Titcher

Cinematography: Ron Rosen

Editing: Alan Caso

Original music: Joseph LoDuca

Cast includes Noah Wyle, Sonya Wagner, Kyle MacLachlan, Kelly Hu, David Dayan Fisher, Jane Curtin, Olympia Dukakis

Reading this blog in the UK?: Buy the DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Some thoughts on Zodiac (2007)

2011-04-25T17:46:00.004+01:00

David Fincher's downbeat and overlong neo-noir thriller pits two cops (played by Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards) and two newspapermen (Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr) against an anarchic serial killer. The incidents depicted are real - the Zodiac killer terrorised California throughout the late sixties and early seventies and was never captured, despite a number of promising leads.

Both the ace-reporter played by the mercurial Downey and Ruffalo's character (the San Francisco cop who was the real-life inspiration for Steve McQueen's Bullitt) make fun of Gyllenhaal's self-confessed fondness for the library. While they kick down doors and hide in the shadows of abandoned warehouses, he borrows books on psychology and code-breaking. Needless to say, our lonely library-goer is nerdish and cannot manage small-talk, the type of man who trips over himself and upsets coffee cups. Downey and Ruffalo dress like they're about to appear on the cover of an expensive lifestyle magazine. Gyllenhaal dresses... well, like he's about to take a trip to the library.

Yet at the film's end it is Gyllenhaal who comes closest to capturing the Zodiac. Downey hits the bottle and meanders into obscurity and white undershirts. Ruffalo is haunted by guilt and bitterness. Gyllenhaal writes a book that sells four million copies. And he gets the girl (though she does look like a librarian). A confused message in a film deliberately saturated with them.

Some thoughts on Twin Peaks ("Pilot", 1990)

2011-04-18T18:53:00.008+01:00

Twin Peaks appears to have been sold to ABC as a standard whodunnit - there are no supernatural elements in the pilot. Opening with the discovery of the dead body of the town's Homecoming Queen, a web of circumstance is immediately spun to suggest she's been killed by her football-captain boyfriend. His arrest takes place in their school library.

Much of what makes Twin Peaks so notable (and so unsatisfying) was made-up by David Lynch as he went along, but in making the putative killer, school principal, and sheriff coincide in the library he demonstrates his mastery of the mise-en-scène. For the accusation to be revealed in a place of quiet and order makes the murder seem even more horrific. Bobby's struggle as the sheriff and deputy escort him out adds another layer of intensity to the unsettling melodrama.

In her preface to The Body in the Library, published in 1942, Agatha Christie recognized that her subject matter was already a well-established cliché. Here, Laura's presence suffuses the library (a bright blue globe reminds us that she's already played out a different cliché - the Lady in the Lake) even though her body was discovered elsewhere. The scene starts and ends with views of the library's empty chairs, recalling the shot of Laura's empty classroom desk we've just broken from. Expertly crafted stuff.

A government that steals library slips is capable of anything...

2011-04-06T20:09:00.012+01:00

The Library of Congress as Panopticon

All the President's Men (1976)

What's it about?
Crusading journalists Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) follow the trail of crumbs which leads from the Watergate building all the way to the Oval Office.

What's it got to do with libraries?
Echoing the film's convolution, the reporters try to connect the bungling burglars to the President's men by making enquiries at the White House library (it would take too long to explain why). A middle-aged woman answers Bernstein's call and volunteers useful information. But someone gets to her when she puts him on hold, and she returns a muddle of contradiction and nervous silences. Woodward tells Bernstein: "We gotta get something on paper". Bernstein replies: "Library of Congress!"

In the Library's Beaux-Arts Jefferson Building the reporters ask for list of books recently sent to the White House. A smarmy, middle-aged, male librarian (in a dusty office - where else?) delights in telling them that they can't have it. Woodward to Bernstein: "We need a sympathetic face". Bernstein to Woodward: "We're not going to find one here".

But these are counter-culture heroes, so what better co-incidence than the appearance of a hip, young, black librarian in a bright room. "I'm not sure you want it, but I got it", he tells them, as though trading something illegal (which of course, he is). They retire to the Reading Room, and in a grand but poorly executed shot, the camera wobbles all the way from their desk to the top of the high dome. Ultimately, nothing helpful can be found among the circulation tickets. The nefarious librarian-silencer has got to the slips too.

This is one of the film's most interesting interludes, in which Pakula's journeyman direction almost says something profound. It both trades on stereotypes and undermines them, and swings between opposites - effusive helpfulness to silence, darkness to light, floor to ceiling, step-bounding expectation of success to the hasty exit of failure. All of these dichotomies spin on the idea and fact of the library, storehouse of both knowledge and myth. There are few words spoken - I have repeated most of them above - in contrast to the phone-hopping and peppy newsroom dialogue of the preceding scenes. The Library of Congress offers an excuse for this silence. The artificiality of the segue into Woodward's contact and meeting with the notorious Deep Throat thus seems less contrived. The library contrasts also provide a metaphor for the odd marriage that is Woodward and Bernstein - one a tidy WASP, the other a beatnik Jew, one the navy lieutenant, the other the child of communists.

The world's largest, most well-funded, and most important library, the Library of Congress has rarely featured in cinema, despite the grandiose classical facade of the Jefferson Building, its elaborate Great Hall, and the immense Reading Room. Perhaps the Library authorities don't want to disrupt the scholars and Congressional aides, or perhaps there simply aren't that many political thrillers that require a library visit to support the plot. Pakula shies away from filming its iconic spaces here (perversely contrarian, the Reading Room scene refrains from showing us the dome altogether, as though the camera rises into it simply to avoid seeing it). Rushing through the light-skinned corridors of political and bibliographical power, the appearance of a black librarian, an oddity in an overly white profession, is another satisfying subversion. The whiteness of contemporary librarianship is one of its most glaring failures, though African-American librarianship has a long tradition, and blacks are less underrepresented in libraries than are other minorities. The Library's rule-busting, helpful, and cool librarian is one of the best role-models on screen, though I won't be sporting an Afro like his anytime soon.

Is it any good?
It's difficult to separate the facts of Watergate, the myth of "Woodstein", their book, and this film. Both journalists have traded off their fame since their investigation into Watergate, Woodward eventually becoming the White House's pseudo-official hack-in-residence, Bernstein following a more stuttering career which mostly seemed to involve his hanging off the arms of glamorous women. Though written, directed, and filmed with great skill and alacrity, there is something oddly unsatisfying about watching a film that Roger Ebert has written "is truer to the craft of journalism than to the art of storytelling".

Director: Alan J. Pakula
Written by William Goldman, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Editing: Robert L. Wolfe
Original music: David Shire
Cast includes Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Hal Holbrook, Jason Robards

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The Mummy, or, Why librarians should never be allowed to read old books

2011-03-05T11:33:00.005Z

You meet the strangest people in the library

The Mummy (1999)

What's it about?
A very loose remake of the 1932 Boris Karloff film, as Hollywood blockbuster remakes will, this has a nonsense plot. In the 1920s, a ragtag bunch of treasure-hunters, deserters, unscrupulous Americans and bumbling Englishmen begin excavating the long-lost Egyptian City of the Dead. Chunky Foreign Legionnaire Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his love interest Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) accidentally awaken a very annoyed, and very bad, mummy, the high-priest Imhotep. Chaos ensues, with Imhotep slowly regenerating from an ugly computer graphic into a lusty Ancient Egyptian as he kills each member of the excavation team in turn. Believing our hero's girl to be his long-dead lover, the stage is set for a showdown featuring hordes of rejuvenated mummies and flesh-eating scarab beetles.

What's it got to do with libraries?
Weisz's character is a librarian working for the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, and she's proud of her profession. She journeys to the City of the Dead for the cause of her library's collection-development policy, as she hopes to find the Golden Book of Amun-Ra. Instead, she finds a top-secret, never-to-be-opened Book of the Dead. Reading it aloud awakens Imhotep. In one of many historical oddities, the Book is in codex (i.e. book-shaped) form. The Egyptians used scrolls. The Romans invented the codex a thousand years later. That's Hollywood for you.

Since I started the Libraries at the Movies blog a number of librarians (all women) have asked when I'm going to write about The Mummy - each spoke of the portrayal of the librarian with delight. In fact, there appears to be a minor cult surrounding 'Evie' Carnahan. Why is this? Because she's sexy and clever? Because she's an intellectual counterpoint to He-Man Fraser? Or because she speaks the line 'Look, I... I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am... I... am a librarian!'

Both library and librarian are, in truth, sad stereotypes. The library is dusty and stuffed full of books with faux antiquarian bindings. The librarian is clumsy and her chief hobby appears to be reading. She is given sex-appeal when she is taken out of the library, when her glasses are removed, and when she plays the damsel-in-distress next to a large barrel-chested man. Oh, I forgot, this is meant to be ironic. Well that's alright then.

Is it any good?
I must confess a fondness for the escapist absurdities of the explosion-filled action / adventure movie. But I stop short of The Mummy, which one critic called 'a gaudy comic video game splashed onto the screen'. Like many a late-nineties cultural production it is suffused with inconsequential irony, but this slapstick knowingness drives it even further into the nonsensical. It made a squillion dollars, producing two inevitable sequels. By the third film the cinemagoing public finally realized how hollow the thrice-repeated plot was. Unfortunately another trilogy is planned. Weisz, the smart Cambridge graduate, bailed after the second film. Fraser, who can (but rarely does) do so much better, looks like he'll be fighting mummies for the rest of his career.

Director: Stephen Sommers
Written by Stephen Sommers, based on the 1932 screenplay of John L. Balderston
Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
Editing: Bob Ducsay
Original music: Jerry Goldsmith
Cast includes Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, Kevin J. O'Connor, Oded Fehr

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Warning: This post will not dote on Audrey Hepburn

2011-02-15T21:41:00.008Z

George Peppard doting on Audrey Hepburn in the NYPL

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

What's it about?
Aspiring writer Paul Varjak (George Peppard, twenty years before The A-Team) moves into an Upper East Side brownstone inhabited by an array of colourful residents. He becomes enamoured of "socialite" Holly Golightly (an affected Audrey Hepburn expertly playing the part of a clotheshorse), who invites him to a wild party packed full of grotesques with improbable names. Paul realizes that he's in love with Holly, but she is determined to marry one of the richer partygoers (though it's soon revealed that she's already married). Holly and Paul run around doing crazy things. She won't admit her love for him, and plans to escape to South America. Yet, as these things will, everything turns out well in the end. Holly isn't really married. Rival suitors fall off the page. Paul is inspired to write. It rains. The hunt for Holly's cat catalyzes a romantic finale. They look into one another's eyes. They embrace. Roll credits.

What's it got to do with libraries?
Showing writers writing is never a good idea in film (Stanley Kubrick managed it in The Shining, but only to emphasize that his writer was writing the same ten words ad infinitum). Instead, there are various cinematic clichés a director can employ to emphasize the writer's craft. Typewriters and neat stacks of foolscap are good. There's the shot of the writer with disarranged tie, leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Then there's the library, the writer's second home.

On a day when they decide to do things that they've never done before, Holly brings Paul to Tiffany's and he brings her to the New York Public Library. His confidence there, in an otherwise hesitant, sensitive performance, demonstrates his embeddedness in the literary world. They order his only published book from the stacks, which he inscribes for the library, though we never learn what he writes. This scene is key to making us believe that two such different people can exist as a couple. Holly encourages Paul's wild side and Paul encourages her sober side. Her pride in him is transparent. Together against the system (a frumpy librarian, who multiply shushes them), they act like giddy teenagers. Holly does confess however, that she doesn't find the library half as much fun as Tiffany's.

The New York Public Library's beaux-arts Main Branch building has provided a memorable location for many films - though we only see five seconds of the outside here, the interior being a mocked-up studio. The same is true of Ghostbusters - the interior shots were filmed 3,000 miles away (in a branch of the Los Angeles Public Library) from the exterior ones. The destruction of the Library in Escape from New York and The Day After Tomorrow provides a simple visual metaphor for the dystopian city. The Library provides a stand-in for the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in the (terrible) remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. I understand that the Library also features in Sex and the City: The Movie. I doubt that I'll ever be able to confirm this.

Is it any good?
Despite the iconic outdoor photography and the odd witty line lifted from Capote's novella, this film is a tragedy. A tragedy because it has been purged of all the poignancy and subversion of the original (itself an imperfect fiction - most of Capote's characters are caricatures). A tragedy because Marilyn Monroe was intended to play Holly Golightly in a role that seems to have been written for her. A tragedy because it shows George Peppard on the cusp of becoming one of Hollywood's leading men before he was destroyed by his anger and his love of the bottle. And a tragedy, finally, because I don't really have the courage of my convictions - the final scene, with the cat, in the rain, I find tender and romantic despite my best efforts to avoid being manipulated.

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;Director: Blake Edwards
Written by George Axelrod, based on the novella by Truman Capote
Cinematography: Franz Planer
Editing: Christian Nyby
Original music: Henry Mancini
Cast includes Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen, Martin Balsam, Mickey Rooney, and Orangey as 'Cat'

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"Don't toy with me Jones. What is the point of all this?"

2011-01-22T15:11:00.010Z


Indy and Mutt trying to escape... from Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg seems to be watching from left.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

What's it about?
What is this film about? Indiana Jones. And aliens. And the KGB. And killer ants. And the guy from Transformers is in it. And lots of British character actors hamming it up. What is this film about?!? It's about Indiana Jones going to the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The film loses the plot about sixty-three seconds in, so there's very little I can add that's not self-evident from the title.

What's it got to do with libraries?
The Indiana Jones films have a soft spot for bibliographical culture. When, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, two army intelligence officers speaking mumbo-jumbo about Nazi shenanigans interrupt a lecture, Dr Jones makes everything clear by opening the ubiquitous leather-bound volume with odd alphabets and line drawings of mythical creatures. When he goes home to pack his bullwhip we see his impressive personal library. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade features a Venetian library, where Indy, crashing through the floor, discovers a clue to the location of the Holy Grail. Libraries and books complement the character — learned, in some ways old-fashioned, reliable, and at times unexpected.

And in Crystal Skull, old. When the KGB attempt to nab him in a fictionalized New Haven, Indy and Mutt — his comic, younger counterweight — escape by motorbike, skittling through the university town by way of nods to a dozen mid-fifties cultural platitudes. They end up, for reasons which are unclear, careering through Yale's Sterling Memorial Library. The KGB are presented as acultural thugs, so presumably the library is a safe place to hide when you're on a 1320cc motorbike (in reality, the Soviet Union had more libraries and librarians per capita than any nation in history). When Indy rides out of the reading room he advises his students "If you want to be a good archaeologist, you've got to get out of the library," explicitly contradicting his opinion in an earlier film that "70% of archaeology is done in the library." He perjures himself again by returning straight home and opening a book (yes, you guessed it, a leather-bound volume with odd alphabets and line drawings of mythical creatures) to help solve an intellectual riddle.

So what's the point of the digression? There are no librarians in this scene, and few books, so the library is immediately flagged as a mere simulacrum. Is it shown simply to provide an impressive setting for the screenwriter's quip? Or for a moment of calm (the bike eventually stops moving) packed with horn-rimmed glasses, chinos, corduroy jackets with leather buttons, and sweater girls wearing bobby socks to remind us that we're in the nineteen-fifties? Or, more likely, to provide a fifteen-second vignette of Indiana Jones before the plot needs to be pushed forward again. The aging professor giving advice both scholarly and paternal in the archetypal education environment; at the same time an all-American iconoclast-adventurer, who, having defeated the Nazis, is getting ready to take on the Evil Empire. A Harley in the library shatters all the rules, as does the entire film, pushing suspension of disbelief far beyond the usual norms.

Is it any good?
Watching Raiders again last Christmas Eve, I was impressed by the witty direction, the cleverly acted performances, the light touches of style, the hints of Kurosawa. The second film is an enjoyable, if mostly forgettable romp, the third a return to form, one set-piece after another, Nazis and religion, what Raiders did so well. In contrast, Crystal Skull is an uninspired mess. Populist and charmless, melodrama with tongue too firmly in cheek, a movie that's been a work-in-progress for too long, and it shows. Some critics admired this film, contrasting the decentness of Jones with the brutality and nihilistic tendencies of twenty-first century movie heroes. I remain unconvinced.

Director: Steven Spielberg
Written by David Koepp, George Lucas, and Jeff Nathanson
Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski
Editing: Michael Kahn
Cast includes Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent

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It would be impossible to sleep in this library - there are too many people walking around

2011-01-05T21:31:00.013Z

Bogart writing in a library book

The Big Sleep (1946)

What's it about?
Archetypal private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is asked by a wealthy general to assist with clearing his youngest daughter’s gambling debts. Things get complicated as soon as Marlowe walks out the door, when the general’s other daughter (Lauren Bacall) flings plot-twists and insults at him. A convoluted tale of murder and betrayal follows, so complex that during filming Howard Hawks phoned Raymond Chandler to ask who had murdered one of the characters (Chandler claimed not to know). A “labyrinthine gumshoe movie”, according to Peter Bradshaw, which “looks for all the world like something David Lynch might have dreamed up”. Philip French, in a recent review, called it “a film of infinite interest.”

What's it got to do with libraries?
Carmen supposedly owes the money to an antique book-seller. Prior to visiting his bookshop, Marlowe swots up on rare books at the Hollywood Public Library, where he consults a copy of Famous First Editions (a book which doesn’t exist in the real world). Fedoras and trenchcoats were evidently not the library-goer’s usual attire in mid-forties Los Angeles. The bespectacled blonde to whom Marlowe returns the book accuses him of not looking like a bibliophile (a fellow Cambridge librarian once told me that my tie was unsuitable for a College library – unfortunately she looked nothing like Carole Douglas).

By referencing his atypical clothes, the librarian subtly undermines a set of prejudices audiences might have about Bogart’s character. Three years earlier he had played Sam Spade - a darker, colder, more obviously flawed private eye - in John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon. The brief library scene, while advancing the plot, also sets Marlowe apart from more traditional hard-men. It's difficult to imagine Spade in a library.

Bogart can go to the library and lose none of his cool. But the library gains by the association. In a playful twist, the studio used the library to promote the film. As if to taunt the film-addled French postmodernists who were teenagers when this film was released (Cahiers du Cinéma critics later referenced the film constantly), the trailer featured Bogart asking a different librarian for help choosing his latest read. When he confesses to being a fan of the Maltese Falcon, she offers him a book that has “everything the Falcon has and more, Raymond Chandler’s latest bestseller [it wasn't], The Big Sleep.” Bogart starts reading the opening lines, the library fades, and corpses, gunshots, car chases, fistfights, and long, loving close-ups of Lauren Bacall fill the screen.

Is it any good?
Bogart and Bacall sharing cigarettes and witty dialogue. A screenplay co-written by William Faulkner based on a Raymond Chandler novel. And Hollywood Public Library (what a job that would be). What’s not to like? Easily the best film made of a Chandler book, with Bogart easily the best Marlowe.

Director: Howard Hawks
Written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler
Cinematography: Sydney Hikcox
Editing: Christian Nyby
Cast includes Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone

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Star Wars 2 - Attack of the Cloned Library

2010-12-11T15:55:00.016Z

Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (2002)

What's it about?

The mechanic / slave / car-racing wunderkind introduced in the first of the Star Wars prequels has now become a surly young man. His relationship with his mentor becomes strained as he discovers the dark side of the force. A series of sub-plots see Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and other Jedi knights take on armies of clones acting as proxies for an ambitious senator.

What's it got to do with libraries?

As a native of Dublin, and a graduate of Trinity College, I can’t help but smile when watching Obi-Wan Kenobi enter the Jedi Library / Archives. Anyone who has ever seen one of the endlessly reproduced images of Trinity’s Long Room will instantly recognize George Lucas’s theft (Lucas denies the similarity – the images above show his denial to be specious). The Irish oak may have been replaced by metallic blue panels and the leather-bound volumes with some kind of Jedi Kindle, but the architecture and furnishings are almost a carbon-copy, down to the marble busts, though Yoda replaces Jonathan Swift.

The ubiquity of the barrel-vaulted library as the early modern storehouse of knowledge – all six Star Wars films are deeply nostalgic – is nowhere better demonstrated. Smirke’s iconic British Museum dome (one of the other classic cinematic libraries), both a triumph of Victorian industry and a nod to Roman grandeur, would not nearly be so appropriate for an on-screen brotherhood who end up fighting a losing battle against an empire.

Attack of the Clones features a Jedi librarian, simultaneously an old woman with her hair, inevitably, in a bun, and a Jedi knight in her own right. The hairstyling goes with a severe personality. The film turns on Obi-Wan Kenobi’s discovery that the archives are incomplete – the librarian denies this is possible.

Is it any good?

The three Star Wars prequels are utterly devoid of the charm and narrative pace of their predecessors. The pyrotechnic space-battles are entertaining, but the characters here are ciphers, the acting wooden, the direction heavy and the writing awful. The librarian as killer spinster is an apt metaphor for the entire film – Lucas fails to make even his clichés believable.

Director: George Lucas
Written by George Lucas, Jonathan Hales
Cinematography: David Tattersall
Editing: Ben Burtt
Cast includes Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Christopher Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Frank Oz, Ian McDiarmid

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