Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide: From the Silent Era Through 1965

by Leonard Maltin

Book Overview

TARGET CONSUMER: Roger Ebert The definitive guide to classic films from one of America's most trusted film critics. Thanks to Netflix and cable television, classic films are more accessible than ever.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0452295777
• ISBN13: 9780452295773
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 828 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 5.2" x 7.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Excellent Guide - Covers Its Ground

This book covers the old movies up to about 1960. In my opinion some of the really old ones it covers could be passed up (e.g. silent films) and may have been included to bulk up the book a bit. Still, I'm sure there must be fans of these that would be unable to find this info elsewhere and it may be valuable for them. This gives excellent coverage to these older pre-1960 movies and can be indespensible as a companion to the frequently inadequate descriptions given in the onscreen guides of satellite TV. I highly recomend it for that. Unlike the 2009 Guide, this one is a nice size and with reasonable size type so it is easy to find a movie and read the description. Now, if Maltin would just dump all of the movies covered in this Classic Guide out of the new book, the new book (2009 Guide) would be better served. Given that the number of movies is expanding exponentially, the newer guides should be broken into 2 sections, as well. Overall, Maltin needs this Classic Guide, a Guide for 1960 - 1990, and a Guide for 1990 - Present (2009 or whatever). Each guide could be comprehensive and a lot better than the inadequate and disappointing 2009 Guide tome. The single best source for all movies, though, is AllMovie.com. NBow, they need to take the descriptions off that website and put them into a 3 volume work as the truly Ultimate Movie Guide!

Indespensible

This volume includes all of the previous movie guides pre-1960 Ratings and reviews. Very nice to have for a classic movie buff, since older "less" necessary films were being ommited every year for the inclusion of newer releases to keep his annual guide at s useable size (not to mention weight!) His and his staffs reviews are as always well thought out and indexed. Also the inclusion of many more early sound and silent films is very helpful.

Old Movie Buff

I love the classics and this book can help you with who starred in them and the yr they were made.

Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide

I like old movies like are shown on Turner Classic Movies and this has the reviews for them. This book is of the same high calibre as Maltin's annual movie review guide. I would say it is indispesible for any old movie buff. Bravo!

Solid first shot at another essential Maltin reference book

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