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Kit Noir Film Festival: "Woolrich Noir" and the B Film

  • The Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room (map)

Lecture by Frank Krutnik, University of Sussex

This free talk was part of The Second Annual Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival
Into the Night: Cornell Woolrich and Film Noir

Of all the writers to transition from pulp magazines to noir movies, Cornell Woolrich was by far the most prolific and most influential. From 1940 to 1954, the heyday of “classic” film noir, Hollywood based 18 films on Woolrich properties, with over 70 radio dramas produced during the same period and the beginnings of an equally abundant crop of television adaptations that would continue into the early 1960s. Focusing in particular on low-budget and independent thrillers, this talk places film adaptations of Woolrich's work in the context of the industrial, stylistic, and narrative practices of B-picture Hollywood.

Frank Krutnik is a Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. Besides contributing to leading international screen studies journals since the early 1980s, he is the author of Popular Film and Television Comedy (1990, with Steve Neale), In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991), and Inventing Jerry Lewis (2000). He is the co-editor of Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (2007) and special issues of the New Review in Film and Television Studies and the Film Studies journal. He is currently writing the monograph Killers on the Kilocycles: Film Noir, Radio Noir and Old Time Radio

About the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival

Short story maestro, former Columbia student, muse of suspense filmmakers: Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) lived all of these lives. The Second Annual Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival presents 12 adaptations of Woolrich’s fiction: from the canonized masterworks of Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut to lesser known “B” films and Monogram potboilers. Many films will be screened in 35mm.

This festival is the second in a ten-year series devoted to the legacy of film noir. It was funded by a generous gift from alumnus Gordon Kit (Columbia College ’76), in honor of his parents. 

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March 30

Kit Noir Film Festival: 'The Guilty' and 'Fall Guy'

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March 30

Kit Noir Film Festival: 'The Leopard Man' and 'Return of the Whistler'