Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide


by Leonard Maltin
  (4 customer reviews)
Paperback: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 (Plume)
List Price: $20.00
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Editorial Reviews


Book Description
From Leonard Maltin, author of the bestselling annual Movie Guide, comes this guide to classic movies. Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide includes more than 7,000 capsule reviews of classic movies, including: The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), High Noon (1952), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967).

In addition, this unique volume also offers a star and director index, a full listing of classic movies on DVD, and Leonard Maltin’s unique Top Ten lists. The result is an authoritative, dynamic guide to the classics no film aficionado should be without.

Reader Reviews


Classic Ripoff, Friday, October 07, 2005

"Classic" implies a degree of excellence. Instead, this book is merely a compilation of movies from the silents through the 50's without regard to merit---from bomb to 4 star. I bought this thinking it was devoted to truly good movies from silents to the present with the turkeys weeded out. It isn't and you would probably be better served to just buy the regular annual guide.


too little - too soon, Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Leonard Maltin put this book out too soon. It seems like a rush job.There are hundreds of films repeated from his classic and, what is worse, there are hundreds of available films that he skips. Many films on TCM this month (April) where missing. The book is needed but it needs more work to fill the void. It should be reworked totally as it is really needed.


The Best DVDs of Classic Films, Thursday, April 07, 2005

I enjoy their new book-Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide (ISBN 0-452-28620-4). I own 38 of their 64 "Our Picks: The Best DVDs of Classic Films." My favorites on their list are:
All About Eve (1950)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

However, I would exclude the following in their next printing:
Foolish Wives (1922)
The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)
Gun Crazy (1949)
Winchester '73 (1950)
The Wages of Fear (1952)
Pickup on South Street (1953)
Written on the Wind (1957)
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
Black Orpheus (1959)
Rocco and His Brothers (1960) (NB Not pre-1960 either)

I would include in their stead the following obvious omissions:
All the King's Men (1949)
Citizen Kane (1941)
From Here to Eternity (1953)
In Which We Serve (1942)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
On the Waterfront (1954)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
The Defiant Ones (1958)
The Lost Weekend (1945)

If they wanted to increase the pick list, I would also include:
A Place in the Sun (1951)
Ben-Hur (1959)
Marty (1955)

The more famous annual Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide has about 18,000 entries. There are many redundant entries among the more than 9000 movies in the new Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide. I presume future editions of the annual Movie Guide will eliminate many of the duplications. The Classic Movie Guide is scheduled to be updated in five years.

Robert F. Naples
Collector



Solid first shot at another essential Maltin reference book, Friday, March 18, 2005

As new movies proliferate but Leonard Maltin's bestselling Movie Guide remains more or less constant at 4" thick and about 18,000 entries, more and more minor old movies have gotten squeezed out (even as they become more and more available on TV).  The answer, at long last, is to split the old movies out as their own book, removing all but the most popular ones from the Movie Guide and adding many, many more entries.  (To start with, Leonard proudly announces, for the first time the complete oeuvres of R. Rogers, G. Autry and W.B. Elliott are reviewed.)

This is one of those things that one can read as a sign that we live either in the best of times or the worst of times for old movies.  On the one hand, it's a recognition that there's a whole lotta folks out there who just won't watch anything before The Godfather at all.  On the other hand, it's really kind of impressive to flip open what looks like the old familiar volume and see Arsenal or Hell's Hinges or People on Sunday rather than, say, the most recent works of Vin Diesel or Jennifer Lopez.

The other encouraging thing, too, is that these all seem to be new reviews.  The fact is, given the enormity of the task of creating a guide, a lot of old movies have always been covered off in the Movie Guide by ancient capsule reviews from some service that supplied synopses to newspapers for their TV listings, and it's clear no one had actually reviewed many of them in any meaningful sense.  So when you see a new entry (say, The Sin of Nora Moran), it actually is a pretty good capsule review, not "**1/2; Lurid programmer about woman on trial for murder," as it might have been if that had been in the old editions.  (In case you think I'm accusing Maltin of something others don't do, go look through a Video Hound guide with a discerning eye and you'll soon see that perhaps only 10% of the "bone" ratings are really based on viewings of the films.)

Flipping through these reviews of movies no critic has actually taken the trouble to write about in decades, one discovers all kind of interesting-sounding things for which one lifetime of movie-watching will surely not be enough-- Mary Boland steals the otherwise static The Solitaire Man... The First Hundred Years is an interesting early treatment of the strains on a two-career couple... did you know that Wild Bill Elliott ended his career with a series of Dragnet-like police programmers, beginning with Dial Red 0 in 1955?  Well, I didn't.

Inevitably, of course, even a 9000-title guide is going to be an arbitrary selection, but it is often frustratingly hard to predict whether something will be in there-- for instance, a weak and utterly obscure Edward Everett Horton vehicle, The Poor Rich, is in there, yet a much better one, Wild Money, which I take to be decidedly better known since I've managed to see it twice theatrically over the last 20 years, is not.  Someone clearly watched the whole John Ford preservation weekend on AMC a few years back, since things like Men Without Women and The Blue Eagle are in there, but on the other hand, no one has yet made an effort to catch up with all of David Shepard's Soviet silent film releases on DVD, as Arsenal may be in there but not the wonderful Bed and Sofa or Outskirts (indeed the foreign film selections seem highly arbitrary and a bit spotty in this first edition).  

It seems to me that if the book is a work in progress (and always will be), and likely to add hundreds of reviews with each new edition, the main progress it needs to make is in keeping up with major DVD releases and showings on TCM, which are the most universal way that people all over the country, not just those in cities blessed with venues like MOMA or the Siskel Center or PFA, see such things.  On a much smaller note, there's a list of classic films which have been blessed with especially good editions on video-- which might be a useful thing if it gave you any clue as to which edition of The General or The Phantom of the Opera is actually good, but doesn't do much more than list a bunch of famous films as it stands now.

But quibbles, quibbles.  I expect this will sell a fraction of what the Movie Guide sells, and yet it will still be one of the best-selling books about classic film in the market, thanks to the magic Maltin name.  People leafing through its dozens of famous and thousands of not so famous titles will discover not only Arsenal but The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, Men Without Women and Men Must Fight and Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail.  Someone looking for a quick review of a minor programmer from 1942 will get a real review, not a long-dead newspaper hack's quickly cribbed synopsis.  It is A Very Good Thing, in short, go and get yours now.