September DVD Spotlight: Film Noir

As a new academic year begins here at Seton Hill, our students have bright, late-summer days and even brighter futures to look forward to, but we're taking a path toward gloom and darkness instead, with our first DVD display of the year: film noir.  One of the most celebrated of American film genres, film noir gained prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, as a certain style of crime films became commonplace in Hollywood during and after World War II.  Often characterized by a stark, shadowy lighting scheme, and a cynical preoccupation with fate, it's a genre that has proven influential up through the modern era.  We've got classic early examples like the proto-noir The Maltese Falcon (1941), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Set-Up (1949), as well as more recent neo-noirs like the Coen brothers' great directorial debut, Blood Simple (1984), and Christopher Nolan's breakout Memento (2001).

Other featured titles include:

The Big Combo (1955)
Director Joseph H. Lewis teamed with the great film noir cinematographer John Alton to make this superb crime drama, about a police lieutenant working to bring down a crime syndicate.

Crossfire (1947)
Three Roberts (Mitchum, Young, and Ryan) headline this pointed film about a police investigation into the brutal murder of a Jewish man by an American soldier during World War II.

Detour (1945)
This ultra-low-budget gem, about a drifter who becomes embroiled in blackmail and murder, is one of the film noir genre's most memorable meditations on fate and chance.  This film is available as part of the library's 5 Film Noir Killer Classics box set.

On Dangerous Ground (1952)
This quintessential film noir stars Robert Ryan as a cop who travels to the country to solve a brutal murder, only to fall in love with the suspect's blind sister.

Out of the Past (1947)
Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca helped establish the archetypal look of film noir with his work on this film, about a former private detective whose past comes back to haunt him. Jane Greer gives an iconic performance in one of the genre's great femme fatale roles.

Touch of Evil (1958)
One of cinema's great opening shots starts off this classic noir, about corruption and murder in a seedy border town.  Orson Welles directs, and also stars as the villainous Police Captain Hank Quinlan.

Take a walk on the dark side, and check one out at the library today!

Closed Monday for Fall Workshop

The library will be CLOSED on Monday, August 19th as the library staff participate in the Seton Hill Fall Workshop. We will reopen on Tuesday morning.

August/September Reading Theme: College Life

For the start of a new academic year, we’re featuring fiction about college students (and professors)!

Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

Zuleika Dobson; or, An Oxford Love Story by Sir Max Beerbohm

A satiric look at undergraduate life at Oxford recounts the humorous impact of a visit by Zuleika, a beautiful young woman, during Eights Week. (Publisher’s summary)


Big Girls Don’t Cry by Connie Briscoe

…[B]estselling author Connie Briscoe (Sisters and Lovers) examines the issues faced by a young black woman determined to be successful both professionally and romantically. Growing up in a loving and supportive middle-class family in Washington, DC, in the '60s, Naomi Jefferson worries about what to wear, her bra size and meeting boys, and she has dreams of one day opening her own clothing store. While she knows racism is a problem (occasional brushes with the uglier side of people don't let her forget it), Naomi is, at heart, just like any other teenage girl.

All of that changes when Joshua, Naomi's older brother, is killed in an accident on his way to a civil rights demonstration in Chicago. Racism becomes a personal issue, and Naomi decides that she needs to help bring about changes in the system. At college in Atlanta, she becomes immersed in politics, organizing protests and butting heads with school administrations as well as with her boyfriend, who isn't too friendly to the cause. Disillusioned by authority figures and betrayed by the man she loves, Naomi returns home, confused about the world and her place in it. (Publisher’s summary) 

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Grady Tripp is a pot-smoking middle-aged novelist and college professor who has stalled on a 2611 page opus. His student James Leer is a troubled young writer obsessed by Hollywood suicides and at work on his own first novel. Grady's pregnant mistress, his bizarre editor Terry Crabtree and another student, Hannah Green, come together in his wildly comic, moving, and finally profound search for an ending to his book and a purpose to his life. (Publisher’s summary)


All Around the Town by Mary Higgins Clark

Professor Alan Grant is found stabbed to death in his New Jersey home. All the evidence points to an obsessed student, twenty-one-year old Laurie Kenyon, who sent him passionate letters, followed him, even watched him through his study window-and awakens in her dorm room, covered with Grant's blood and clutching the knife that killed him. (Publisher’s summary)


The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

Lauren changes boyfriends every time she changes majors and still pines for Victor who split for Europe months ago and she might or might not be writing anonymous love letter to ambivalent, hard-drinking Sean, a hopeless romantic who only has eyes for Lauren, even if he ends up in bed with half the campus, and Paul, Lauren's ex, forthrightly bisexual and whose passion masks a shrewd pragmatism. They waste time getting wasted, race from Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours to Dressed To Get Screwed parties to drinks at The Edge of the World or The Graveyard. The Rules of Attraction is a poignant, hilarious take on the death of romance. (Publisher’s summary)


Due to Lack of Interest, Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled by Irene Kampen

When Irene Kampen returned to the University of Wisconsin as a 45 year old undergraduate, she discovered, among other things:

*Saul Bellow wrote Herzog. Or did Herzog write Bellow?

*A magic marker was absolutely necessary (because when taking lecture notes you had to put a mark through a particularly important note so that when you were studying you would know it was a particularly important note

*Her old sorority house had been converted to the Ayn Rand Co-educational and residential eating co-operative house

*There wasn't quite as much room on the walls of those "Hallowed Halls" for the ivy since the student underground had taken to leaving messages like: Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been canceled. (Goodreads.com summary)


Souls and Bodies by David Lodge

The ups, downs, and exploits of a group of British Catholics--for whom the sexual revolution came a little later than it did for everybody else...

In this bracing satire, a group of university students make their way through the fifties and into the turbulent sixties and seventies. We first meet Dennis, Michael, Ruth, Polly, and the others at the altar rail of Our Lady and St. Jude, but soon enough they get caught up in the alternately hilarious and poignant preoccupations of work, marriage, sex, and babies--not always in that order. (Publisher’s summary)


I’ll Take You There: A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

An astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a nameless young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, "Anellia" (as she sometimes calls herself) falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead. (Publisher’s summary)


Love Story by Erich Segal

Oliver Barrett IV, a wealthy jock from a stuffy WASP family on his way to a Harvard degree and a career in law . . . Jenny Cavilleri, a sharp-tongued, working-class beauty studying music at Radcliffe...

Opposites in nearly every way, Oliver and Jenny are kindred spirits from vastly different worlds. Falling deeply and powerfully, their attraction to one another defies everything they have ever believed—as they share a passion far greater than anything they dreamed possible . . . and explore the wonder of a love that must end too soon. (Goodreads.com summary)


The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill. (Publisher’s summary) (Kelly's note-- I loved this book! It was so atmospheric and creepy and crazy. The rest of my book club, however... not so much.)


Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers by Cynthia Voigt

In 1961 at a college for academically gifted women, three roommates who differ substantially from each other are brought together by a common interest in volleyball. (Publisher’s summary)


I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time...

With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler. (Publisher’s summary)