Library Video of the Week, October 8, 2012

To Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, directed by Howard Hawks. (1945.) Written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, from a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

            A film most notable for being the first screen appearance of Bogart and Bacall as a duo, this pick from the Library’s classic collection features great dialog and undeniable sparks from the stars.  Bogart plays essentially the same character he played in Casablanca—the expatriate American who doesn’t want to get involved in the World War but finds himself drawn into a fight between the Free French of Caribbean Martinique and the Nazi collaborators of Vichy France who run the island.   Unlike Casablanca, this time Bogart gets the girl.  Spare in settings, the action and characters carry what is arguably one of the Bogart/Bacall team’s best movies.
           If you haven’t seen it for awhile, or if you’ve never sen it, add it to you watch list.

Library Video of the Week, April 9, 2012.

The English Patient starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliet Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kirsten Scott Thomas.  Directed by Anthony Minghella. 1996. Library Call Number: PN1995.9.W3 E65 2004

          Winner of numerous awards, this is movie-making on an epic scale. Told in flashbacks of the life of a terminally burned, unknown man in a British military hospital during World War II, the story begins just before the war, in 1939, when Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almasy is mapping unexplored regions of the Sahara for the Royal Geographical Society during an archaeological expedition.  He, and his co-explorer, Madox, are soon given financial and moral support when Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton join their exploration.  Almasy and Katherine find a great attraction for each other and are soon involved in an affair that turns bad just as World War II erupts.  Jealousy, love, hate and shame, betrayal and luck all take their turn as the emotional cyclone envelops all the characters against a backdrop of all-out war.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, January 23, 2012



Pacific Air: how fearless flyboys, peerless aircraft and fast flattops conquered the skies in the war with Japan by David Sears.

 Library Call Number: D773.S43 2011.

        David Sears brings to life the air war in the Pacific, through the stories not only of the combat pilots, but of the engineers in America responsible for designing the wartime aircraft at Grumman. Alternating his narration of how F4F Wildcats fared against the Mitsubishi Zero with the evolution of Grumman designs on the home front that led to the F6F Hellcat, Sears provides the reader with an understanding of how designs improve during war.  From the Battle of the Coral Sea to the Battle of the Marianas, Grumman planes were in the forefront of the fighting and the memories of the pilots provide a great deal of drama and insight into the vast theater of the Pacific War.

Library Video of the Week, May 9, 2011.

The Children of Huang Shi, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Radha Mitchell, Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode. 2009.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.C47C45 2009.
     One of the many virtually unknown gems released in recent years, this film—set in 1937 China and based on a true story--revolves around George Hogg (Meyers), an ambitious British journalist, who sneaks into Nanjing as the Japanese are desolating it. Captured and tortured by the Japanese, he is saved from certain death by a Chinese rebel (Chow Yun Fat) and flees with him into the interior of China, ambitiously seeking to find another story that will bring him fame.
     Instead, his friend talks him into taking control of a leaderless orphanage and 60 feral young boys. With the help of a traveling, war-weary Australian nurse (Mitchell), Hogg reluctantly tends the boys until the Japanese near the valley. Pressured by the Chinese army to turn the boys over to them as soldiers, Hogg instead packs them up and flees, taking his wards 500 miles over the Silk Road and the Liu Pan Shan Mountains into the Gobi Desert and safety, with the help of his friend, the nurse and a former aristocrat turned opium smuggler. The movie chronicles a dark period of world history and—in Schindler-like fashion—finds some light.

Library Video of the Week, March 7, 2011.

The Man in the Glass Booth, starring Maximillian Schell, Lois Nettleton and Luther Adler. Directed by Arthur Hiller. 1975.  Library Call number: PR6069.H39 M36 003.

        From the American Film Institute series of theater into film, comes this complex psychological drama about vengeance and justice, written by actor Robert Shaw. Schell plays millionaire Jewish businessman Arthur Goldman, who lives luxuriously in Manhattan and often discomforts his employees with his disrespectful observations of his fellow Jews. They are even more shocked when Israeli agents show up, arrest Goldman and fly him to Israel to stand trial as a despised Nazi war criminal. The Israeli prosecutor, Miriam Rosen (Nettleton), believes she has an airtight case against him and Goldman encourages her hatred of him by shedding his Jewish identity, becoming arrogant and spiteful; he demands to be tried in SS uniform. Set in a glass box in the courtroom so that no one can kill him before the sentence of death, Goldman is the quintessential SS exterminator.
         This is a tour de force for Schell, who blazes away at his accusers, sneering at his former friends and the court, until the sudden, shocking ending.