Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product 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.

About the Author

Leonard Maltin is one of the country’s leading film critics and historians. He has written a number of books (including Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons), appeared on television’s Entertainment Tonight for more than twenty years, and teaches at the University of Southern California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: Plume (February 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452286204
• ISBN-13: 978-0452286207
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #10,446 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

160 of 162 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid first shot at another essential Maltin reference book, March 17, 2005

By	Michael Gebert (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

P.S. Two factual notes in regards to other reviews posted here: while it is true that the same reviews of some better-known pre-1960 movies also appear in Maltin's main movie guide, the overlap is not large. This book has thousands of pre-1960 reviews not in the other one; that book has thousands of post-1960 reviews not in this one. As for the person who felt deceived by the term "classic," well, yes, it is used in the sense of "belonging to a classic age" rather than as an indication of individual merit. For them I would suggest Roger Ebert's The Great Movies, which is strictly devoted to genuine classic films.

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful for fans of older obscure movies, including some B westerns, October 26, 2005

By	Louis B. Parks (Houston, Tx. United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A book not meant to do everything for all movie fans, but for its intended audience, highly useful - not as a replacement for Maltin's main book, Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide, but as a supplement and complement. Don't buy it as your main guide or you will be disappointed: it has no movies newer than 1960.
Also, the title can be confusing: classic here means old movies, not best movies. Some other reviewers here obviously did not understand that, and understandably felt cheated.
For 31 years, I've found it hard to imagine selecting movies to watch on TV - and more recently movies to rent or buy on DVD - without Maltin's Movie and Video Guide. For handy, short reviews, it's usually reliable - at least for my taste, which runs from action to romance, mainstream to arty, foreign to old Hollywood. Probably like yours if you bother to read reviews.
However, with newer movies forcing out older ones from the main guide, Maltin decided to create this one, allowing him to add back some he'd had to drop over the years, and also add in some there was never room for, because they were more obscure or not as good. (That includes some of the old B westerns of Rogers, Autry, Hopalong and early John Wayne.)
There is not an extensive list of directors and only a partial list of the main stars. The idea of this book is to be able to haul it into the store, or keep it by your TV, to get a quick idea if a movie is worth catching. And, of course, for just pleasant browsing. For more detailed reviews or complete filmographies, you'll have to go to other books or websites. For newer movies, you'll need a different book such as the main Maltin. But if you think Turner Classic Movies is the greatest network in the universe, grab this baby.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Companion that shouldn't stand alone, February 28, 2006

By	Z Harpole (Memphis TN) - See all my reviews

A good book for lovers of old movies who hate browsing through the 1600 pages of Maltin's regular guide only to find the film their looking for between a BOMB by Adam Sandler and a Yugoslavian-Japanese Documentary nobody has ever heard of. The Classic Movie Guide was not made to be a list of 4-star, really great old movies. It was made as a companion guide to the regular book as a place to put older, minor films to make room for newer movies in the regular guide. People who feel cheated because their 2006 guide still contains Gone With the Wind should probably know that it will always be in both guides, but films such as Law and Order(1953) or O. Henry's Full House(1952) may one day only be found in the classic guide. They should also note that their 2006 guide is about 100 pages thinner than the 2005 guide and that reviews of vintage series (e.g. Blondie, The Thin Man) are no longer listed in the regular guide and have been moved to the classic guide. In my understanding of this book, more and more minor old films will be removed from the regular guide and placed in the classic guide which will be revised every 5 years. My suggestions for this book would be to change the title to Leonard Maltin's Vintage Movie Guide and add films made before 1965 but after 1960, such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Lawrence of Arabia. I also would suggest making a third guide in about five or six years just for foreign films, excluding British films of course.