Customer Reviews

The Paramount Story

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Like the other books in this series - histories of MGM, Columbia, Warner Brothers, RKO, United Artists and Universal - John Douglas Eames' "The Paramount Story" adheres to the series' tried-and-true format; capsule discussions/reviews of all the movies ever released by the studio (at least up to the date of publication - please note that all these books have been out of print for years, so don't cover the studios' more recent releases), accompanied by hundreds of black-and-white photos of scenes from these movies. This book, like the others in the series, is huge and makes a perfect coffee-table display item - not that you're just going to leave it sitting there if you're interested in the subject. I own all of the books in the series except "The Columbia Story" and consider them to be excellent quick-reference works for the films of classic Hollywood.

By comparison with other books in this series, "The Paramount Story" is a little disappointing. When I was writing Mystery, Suspense, Film Noir and Detective Movies on DVD: A Guide to the Best in Cinema Thrills, I had a number of occasions to refer to this book, but in seventy per cent of cases, I found the movie I wanted confined to the list of also-rans. It's hard to believe, for example, that famous films and popular DVDs like "Father Brown, Detective", "The Unseen", "Feet First", "The Benson Murder Case", "Scrooge", "One Body Too Many", "Gulliver's Travels", "Daughter of Shanghai", "King of Chinatown", "The Preview Murder Mystery", "Big Brown Eyes", "Coronado", "Car 99", "Trio", "Encore", "Night Has a Thousand Eyes" and even "The Shepherd of the Hills" would you believe, are not covered in the main section but relegated to brief listings in yearly addenda. Nonetheless, the book does provide a feast of photos and information for those films somewhat arbitrarily selected for the more detailed reviews.

This book is in excellent condition for a used item and is everything a Movie Buff could want.
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