Librarians in Popular Culture - Film

Film

According to Ann Seidl, director of the documentary The Hollywood Librarian, librarians in film are often portrayed as meek, timid, and unassertive in nature. After indexing hundreds of appearances of librarians in film, she found that "the shorter the reference to a librarian in a film, the worse the stereotype."

By the 1950s, movies had established the stereotype of librarians as "spinsters" and "eggheads". Thus, female movie librarians are usually unmarried, prim, and introverted. They are usually young and may be attractive, but dress drably and are sexually repressed. The "fate-worse-than-death view of librarians" is particularly evident in movies such as It's a Wonderful Life and The Music Man.

Male movie librarians - mild, intelligent, and timid - have fewer and less important roles.

Seidl's documentary discusses such stereotypes as:

• A wretched alternate fate is revealed for Mary Hatch Bailey (played by Donna Reed) in the movie It's a Wonderful Life (1946): "She's an old maid. She never married...She's just about to close up the library!"
• The staggeringly rude and unhelpful librarian (John Rothman) in Sophie’s Choice (1982), who barks at Sophie Zawistowski (Meryl Streep) “Do you want me to draw you a map?!”

in contrast with such more well-rounded characters as:

• Librarian Bunny Watson (played by Katharine Hepburn) who teaches Richard Sumner (played by Spencer Tracy) a few things about modern research methods in the movie Desk Set (1957).
• The no-nonsense "Marian the Librarian" (Shirley Jones) in the movie The Music Man.

Librarians are usually ordinary people caught up in circumstances, rather than being heroes; likewise they are rarely villainous although they may have flaws, such as racism in Goodbye, Columbus.

Other movie appearances of librarians noted in the literature include:

• Mary (played by Parker Posey) as the ultimate Party Girl (1995) who discovers, "I want to be a librarian!" in a notable exception to the prim librarian stereotype.
• Alicia Hull (Bette Davis), a small town librarian, who befriends young Freddie Slater (Kevin Coughlin) but is herself ostracised for refusing to remove a book on Communism from the public library during the height of the Red Scare in Storm Center (1956). This movie was inspired by the real-life dismissal of Ruth Brown, a librarian in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

In Only Two Can Play Peter Sellers plays the role of a poorly paid and professionally frustrated Welsh librarian and occasional drama critic, whose affections fluctuate between glamorous Liz and his long-suffering wife Jean.