The library had a nice selection of DVDs. They have some nice choices from the foreign film genre, as well as some Classical Hollywood titles. I picked up L.A Confidential (1997) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). I watched L.A. the other night, and I enjoyed it. A great neo-noir if anyone is interested. I'm looking forward to checking out Baby Jane. It's supposed to be a great film, and it's a real treat to see a film with both Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in it.
I also took out two Dashiell Hammett books. One contains all five of his novels, which is a really great thing to have around the bedroom. I've only read The Thin Man (1934), so I need to get around to checking out the others. The other book I took out his called Lost Stories (2005). It's really great because it contains 21 Hammett stories that have been long-unavailable to the public, only a few scholars and collectors having access to them beforehand. A great angle of the book is that before each story, an explanation is given in regards to "how the author's life shaped his story and how the story fit in his life." So you get to become acquainted with 21 Hammett stories as well as get a history lesson on the author's life.
What's important to try and discover while reading anything by Hammett is how his writing proves that he is one of the most important figures in literature. A lot of critics find this claim hard to run with since Hammett wrote mystery/crime fiction, a genre that has a lot of trouble gaining acclaim for its serious literary value. Other people couldn't agree more with this claim, ranking Hammett along the same lines as Faulkner and Hemingway. * Interesting fact: Hammett and Hemingway were big fans of one another, and there is a "chicken-or-egg" argument about who influenced who. Joe Gores discusses this in further depth in his introduction to Lost Stories.
Here are a few excerpts from Joe Gores' introduction that struck me as poignant:
"When he started, Hammett was not a writer learning about private detection. He was a private detective learning about writing. As he wrote, he retained the detective's subconscious attitudes toward life. It is this subconscious state of mind that separates his work from that of his followers Chandler and Macdonald." (21)
"Despite the genre demands, Hammett's novels have all the hallmarks of fine literature: economy of expression, creation of character with a few bold strokes, realistic depiction of milieu, sentiment without sentimentality. But the stories he told were about real private eyes in their world because real private eyes in their world were who he knew." (21)
"...spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before." - Raymond Chandler (18)
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