Summer is right around the corner with box office hits and wonders from the silver screen. This summertime let’s take a different route for movies. Instead of the typical blockbusters that epitomize the season, let’s explore a more suave thriller. Here we’ll go over the records and information management (RIM) possibilities that noir movies have to offer.
He Walked By Night (1948)
This is a classic noir film produced in the style of a documentary that recounts a tale of the hunt for a cunning thief by the police and the forensic techniques the police used in order to track him down.
Throughout the film, we see a variety of records series and what roles they play in the story as instruments to convey information and facts, and in what part of the records lifecycle these records are. In records management, the records lifecycle refers to the period of duration in which records are used from its beginning (the creation or receipt of the record), the middle (the maintenance and retention), and the end (the disposition or archiving of records). Of the records lifecycle, the first two phases can be observed during the duration of the film.
Within the first 10 minutes, we see in the communication room of the police station, sheets containing information by people calling in and reporting for safety services to the police. These records would potentially be classified as Dispatch Reports found in Schedule PS: Records of Public Safety Agencies. This is the creation phase of a record, and the information collected from the public calling in would include the nature of the service requested and the response to it in the daily course of business in keeping the city safe.
Another time in the film we observe records in use is after the detective realizes the criminal’s overall modus operandi in how and where he learned to avoid and evade police detection. The detective begins to review active employment files, which would mean he would have to comb through records that may fall under the series Employee Service Records found in Schedule GR: Records Common to All Local Governments. After the detective reviews those records only to find out that the criminal was no longer an active employee of a police department, he has to review the records in the “dead files” to identify the criminal. The dead files in this scene show us the second phase of the records lifecycle—the maintenance and retention of records, where the records are not in active use, but have not met the retention requirements for disposal.
To know how the detectives caught wind of this resourceful thief and how the mystery thriller ends, check out this film. It’s a fun watch.
Have you noticed the kind of records used in detective stories?
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