Leonard Maltin's mad about movies

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 500, June 5, 2010

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LEONARD MALTIN: IS HE
EVER MAD ABOUT MOVIES?

Two new books reveal this critic and
historian's crazy love for motion pictures

By John Greenwald

In his official biography, Leonard Maltin says he's a film critic and historian. True as that many be, I think of Maltin as America's greatest film fan. He loves movies and the people who make them -- not only the big stars but the not-as-famous but the lesser-known performers and other artists who work behind the camera.

If you follow movies, it's hard to miss Maltin's smiling, salt-and-pepper bearded face. Every September, his "Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide" comes out, filling bookstores and airport news racks. He's been editing the guides with a small squad of sub-editors since 1969. They were updated irregularly until they became an annual in 1987. The 2010 edition has 17,000 entries, with 300 new ones.

(Since 17,000 are about as many mini-reviews a printer can fit into a 1664-page paperback, I wonder where the 300 deleted entries go to make room for the new ones each year. I wish Maltin and his publisher have set up a searchable database on the Web for all his "Movie Guide" entries. I'd pay good money for that. However, Maltin has put many of his older reviews in editions of his "Classic Movie Guide.")

Maltin's written or co-written books on animation, radio's golden age, the Little Rascals, movie comedians, Disney movies, cinematography, a family film guide and a film encyclopedia.

He's also all over TV. For 29 years, he's been a film historian and correspondent for the syndicated "Entertainment Tonight." On cable, he appears on the Starz network and the Reelz!Channel. He co-produced the DVD collection of "Walt Disney Treasures" and hosts a series of John Wayne feature films for Paramount Home Video and "Night at the Movies" segments for Warner Home Video. He's active in film preservation and helps select the 25 films named each year to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

And he has a Web site: Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy at http://blogs.indiewire.com/leonardmaltin -- a collection of his reviews of new films, old ones, and pieces about film ephemera, such as old movie magazines. He's a film critic and historian of course, but for me Leonard Maltin is America's greatest film fan.

Which brings me to two recent books of his that I've been reading: "Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen" (Harperstudio, 2010) and "Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy" (M Press, 2008). (Note how Maltin's name goes above the title; he's become a brand unto himself, like certain movies stars.)

What struck me about his "151 Films" is the enthusiasm with which he writes his short reviews -- each is one plus pages. A few examples.

"La Cuidad" (1999): "When a movie stays in my consciousness for years it's amazing."

"King of the Hill" (1993): "When I see a movie I like I want to spread the word. When I see a movie I love [Matlin's italic] I become a one-man public relations campaign ... ."

"What Doesn't Kill You": "If ever a film deserves a second chance, this one does."

"Scarecrow" (1973) "is a road movie crossed with a character study, and the two stars [Gene Hackman and Al Pacino] catch lightening in a bottle."

Each review is complete with pithy plot lines and character descriptions, comments about both, and why these films failed at the box office despite their obvious excellence.

There are many books like Maltin's "151 Best Movies You've Never Seen." They're usually old within five years. But Maltin makes one strong editorial decision. He limits all but a few choices to films made in the last 20 years -- a wise choice. (By now, unheralded but excellent movies of a generation or three ago have become heralded, anyway.)

Maltin's 151 picks rank among what he calls the "unfamiliar." Independent and foreign films, documentaries as compelling as fiction films, offbeat ones, and films that should have developed a reputation, but didn't.

Though I see upwards of 220 movies a year, and try to stay away from too many big box off hits, I've only seen maybe 20 percent of the films in this book. But the book's dangerous for Netflix subscribers like me; I can see myself immediately adding another 50 titles to my Netflix queue.

Maltin's "Movie Crazy" is for film lovers only. It's mainly interviews with people filmgoers under 40 have probably never heard of. There's chapter on "Silent Sabotage," stars who should have the made transition from silents to talkies, but didn't; Joan Leslie, a 1940's star; and Jimmy Lydon, a child though adult actor, 1939-1987 (his Henry Aldrich teen movies almost ruined his career, because of typecasting).

Other interviews include writer-director Blake Edwards, director of photography Joseph Biroc, and orchestrator Alexander Courage, who wrote the "Star Trek" theme. Maltin is mainly interested how his subjects began in Hollywood, and most have nothing but kind words about their studio-mates However, Lydon is brutal about a few, including famed director Victor Fleming. He "didn't know beans about directing," Lydon says.

Oh, Maltin has one "scoop," that Jack Warner wanted to sign Orson Welles to star in "The Man Who Came to Dinner" (1942). Didn't happen.

Both highly informative books offer insight to Maltin's mad love of movies, his readable writing style and the wealth of film knowledge inside his broadly smiling head.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.  

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Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved