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Both are the very best of their kind. I had purchased the first edition of this book when it was called T.V.Movies. Buy now. You'll be a film buff in no time. Many years have come and gone;Now it's in two volumes. This is the book for movies from1960 and before.
It is s great supplement to his annual guide. This turned out to be great; extremely useful.
As comprehensive movies reference books go, Maltin's is the one to own. This is the type of guide you'll want to keep around forever, since there will never be that much updating to do (save adding more foreign/hitherto obscure films as they are released on DVD and reach a wider audience, so maybe update it every 5 years or longer). I should say, though, that Maltin is pretty good with the most important foreign films, especially French ones.4) Include the production studio for each film. I've been buying Leonard Maltin's annual movie guide since 1974 and I have never been swayed away from finding it to be the best guide out there of its type. This is maybe not as essential an idea as those above, but knowing the studio is helpful. True, the book would be thicker, but see my next comment.2) Offer a hardcover edition of the book. Various classic studios had their own styles and subjects (e.g., Warner brothers' gangster films, Universal's horror films, RKO's always reliable B-movies, the mostly horrible output of PRC and Monogram, great B studios like American International, Hammer, etc)., so it's often useful when coming across a film you've not known about before to know what studio produced it.All in all, though, this is truly the best guide to classic films out there.
I would like to make several suggestions for a revised version (I hope there is one), however:1) Bump up the cutoff year. But companies like Criterion are digging up hitherto lesser-known foreign classics, and all of those should be in here (also, there are quite a few British B films missing). I rarely run across an American film that isn't already included in the guide, but foreign films are a little less likely to appear here for the obvious reason that they are less known and widely seen in America. Maltin and his editors obviously had to pick a cutoff date, and they chose 1960, but that seems a little arbitrary. A more durable hardcover book can also accommodate more pages.3) Add more foreign films as they are released on DVD.
Maltin's capsule reviews are peerless, managing to really capture the essence of a film in only a few lines, and even when mostly panning a film, pointing out the good parts. My paperback is only a couple of years old, but I refer to it so often it's already falling apart. This would enable the inclusion of most of the classic black and white films of the 60s and incorporate those films that signaled the beginning of the modern era: Bonnie & Clyde (the modern crime film), Night of the Living Dead (the modern horror film), 2001 (the modern sci-fi film), etc. Since I gravitate more toward classic movies than current ones and watch TCM religiously, I was really happy when this guide came out. True, times really changed during that decade, but I would move the cutoff date up a little to when the MPAA was formed and the era of the modern film really began: 1968 (or if you want to round it up, 1970).
This book resolved the problem. My wife was disappointed in the annual books as they did not contain a lot of the older movies.
silent films) and may have been included to bulk up the book a bit. Given that the number of movies is expanding exponentially, the newer guides should be broken into 2 sections, as well.
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. Overall, Maltin needs this Classic Guide, a Guide for 1960 - 1990, and a Guide for 1990 - Present (2009 or whatever).
This book covers the old movies up to about 1960. 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.
NBow, they need to take the descriptions off that website and put them into a 3 volume work as the truly Ultimate Movie Guide. In my opinion some of the really old ones it covers could be passed up (e.g.
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.
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