Summary: "Joel and Ethan Coen's career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleazy bar owner releases a torrent of violence with one murderous thought ... Blood Simple reinvented the film noir for a new generation, marking the arrival of a filmmaking ensemble that would transform the American independent...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2016
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Crime / Mystery DVDs, Call number: BLU-RAY CRIME/MYSTERY BLOSummary: A down on his luck screenwriter reluctantly agrees to adapt a trashy bestseller to the silver screen. Rather than read the book himself, Steele convinces a star-struck hatcheck girl, Mildred Atkinson, to accompany him home and tell him the story in her own words. Later the night, Mildred is found murdered and Steele, who has a history of violent behavior, becomes the prime suspect. A neighbor...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2016
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Drama DVDs, Call number: BLU-RAY DRAMA INSummary: "Ernest Hemingway's simple but gripping short tale "The Killers" is a model of economical storytelling. Two directors adapted it into unforgettably virile features: Robert Siodmak, in a 1946 film that helped define the noir style; and Don Siegel, in a brutal 1964 version that was intended for television but deemed too violent for home audiences and released theatrically instead. The first is...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2015
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Crime / Mystery DVDs, Call number: BLU-RAY CRIME/MYSTERY KILSummary: "Melodrama casts noirish shadows in this portrait of maternal sacrifice from Hollywood master Michael Curtiz. Its iconic performance by Joan Crawford as Mildred, a single mother hell-bent on freeing her children from the stigma of economic hardship, solidified Crawford's career comeback and gave the actor her only Oscar. But as Mildred pulls herself up by the bootstraps, first as an unflappable...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2017
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Drama DVDs, Call number: BLU-RAY DRAMA MILSummary: "Legendary director Nicholas Ray began his career with this lyrical, dark love story, the first in a series of existential genre films overflowing with sympathy for America's outcasts and underdogs. When the wide-eyed fugitive Bowie (Farley Granger), having broken out of prison with some bank robbers, meets the innocent Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell), each recognizes something in the other that no...
Format: moving image
Publisher / Publication Date: 2017