by Emily Smith

Winter’s just around the corner here in Seattle, and while on the one hand it’s sad to see the mild weather and long days go, I always look forward to the activities that come with what follows: the festivity of the holidays, hunkering down indoors, cooking, eating, and (being a librarian) reading. But winter’s also the season when I actually have a decent chance of making a dent in my seemingly ever-expanding Netflix queue.

I have a tendency to like to group my movie watching into themes – artist documentaries, Westerns, and so on – and lately I was thinking about librarians in movies, and movies about librarians. I sadly realized that aside from the cult classic (and personal favorite) Party Girl, and the memorable scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s that portrays librarians in a rather unflatteringly grumpy light – I couldn’t put together a very respectable film festival on the theme. Feeling that this was rather unacceptable for someone in our profession, I spent a little time online and quickly discovered that I wasn’t the first person to think about compiling such a list, or to think about how librarians have been portrayed in film throughout history.

Over at Huffington Post I found this piece, originally posted a couple of years ago: “Librarians Save the Day! 11 Great Movies in Which They Star.” For those of you who, like me, missed it the first time around, it’s worth a look. In addition to Party Girl, the selection includes:

• National Treasure (2004) (“Nicholas Cage stars as treasure hunter Ben Gates in this 2004 action flick. Seeking a treasure the founding fathers buried, he enlists the help of Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), the curator of the National Archives.”)
• Desk Set (1957) (“This 1957 romantic comedy stars Katherine Hepburn as a librarian in the Reference Department at a TV station. When Spencer Tracey becomes the new supervisor, the librarians get angry and the sparks start to fly.”)
• Foul Play (1978) (“Gloria Mundy (Goldie Hawn) is a San Francisco librarian who gets tangled up in solving a murder.”)
• Storm Center (1956) (“Bette Davis stars as Alicia Hull, small town librarian. When Hull refuses to remove “The Communist Dream” from shelves, she herself is branded as a communist.”)

See the full list here.  (Huffington Post is not the first to compile such a list – check out Amazon’s suggestions,Film Librarian (“an online database of films featuring librarians”) and Librarians in the Movies: an Annotated Filmography, put together by Martin Raish, formerly of the David O. McKay Library, at Brigham Young University in Idaho.

And finally, for old times’ sake, but really mostly for that colleague of mine – you know who you are! – who (scandal!) has not seen Party Girl yet:

What are you waiting for? Pop that popcorn and get ready to veg.