Seminar: Out of the Past

Join Wellesley College English Professor Vernon L. Shetley for an introduction to what The Village Voice called "one of the most unsparing and bleakly beautiful of all films noir.”

Jacques Tourneur's landmark noir features Robert Mitchum at his tough-guy best, surrounded by a colorful supporting cast that includes Jane Greer as the ultimate femme fatale and Kirk Douglas as a no-good mob boss.

About the Speaker

Vernon L. Shetley is an English Professor at Wellesley College. Shetley studies and teaches American poetry and film, focusing particularly on contemporary poetry and classic Hollywood cinema. He is currently working on a book on film noir from the 1970s to the present, which focuses on the representation of economics within these films. Shetley is particularly interested in the way that trust, and the lack of trust, shape the economy of crime in neo-noir filmmaking; and in the way that the cinematic private detective embodies a transformation in the role of the professions within the larger economy.