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There are two annual tasks I make sure are attended to: the renewal of my subscription to Cue Magazine and the purchase of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. Cue is long gone, of course, but fellow recovering New Yorkers of a certain age will remember it as the weekly publication that listed what was going on in town. Its movie section was exhaustive, listing every film playing at every theater in the five boroughs. During the 1950s, it was the guide for my almost daily forays to movie palaces still in their glory and grotty neighborhood cinemas that declined sans benefit of an apex. Without the information provided by Cue I doubt if I would have embarked on a life in movies that consumed my youth, middle age and now my dotage. And without LEONARD MALTIN’S MOVIE GUIDE, navigating the vast choice of films offered by Netflix and the dozens of cable movie channels provided by my satellite system, selecting what films to watch would be a near impossible task. Of course there are other doorstopper thick compilations of myriad thumbnail reviews, but none approach the eerie accuracy of Maltin’s evaluation of the more than 17,000 movies listed. Beyond this curious mind-meld of opinions between myself and the editor there are the brightline nuggets of information embedded in each compressed paragraph of credits, description, awards and enticing odd facts. Especially helpful is the reverse directory at the end of the book. One can search for all the films listed that feature a certain actor or more important to this unreconstructed auteurist, all the films created by a certain director. Among the ancillary features stuffed into this huge book is a fascinating list of "50 Films You May Have Missed," which won me over with its inclusion of Pepe Le Moko and Elevator To The Gallows. There's also my favorite page, which I expect to disappear each year, a victim of the need for compression: the Widescreen Glossary. It lists every known variation of VistaVision, CinemaScope, UltraScope and all the other formats that were initially created in the 1950s to lure people away from their TVs and back into theaters. This wedding of technology and ballyhoo eventually led to the amazing vistas created today by directors working with their camera crew. Finally, the inevitable knock-on effect of new releases that must be covered plus the flood of films that were once thought lost but have been rescued for release on feature-packed DVDs has prompted the need for a companion volume: LEONARD MALTIN'S CLASSIC MOVIE GUIDE, which is also highly recommended.
Reviewed by Rudy Franchi, January 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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