After five years I’m proud to announce the publication of a revised edition of Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide (Plume), now available in stores and online. It’s more than 100 pages thicker than the first volume, with many changes, additions, and corrections. In the first Classic volume we reviewed 1,100 titles we’d never covered before in my Annual Guide. This time we have 300 brand new entries, covering films from the teens through the 1960s, and featuring stars like Lon Chaney, Cary Grant, and Douglas Fairbanks, as well as films from such formidable directors as Jean Renoir, F.W. Murnau, Frank Borzage, Yasujiro Ozu, and Ernst Lubitsch. We’ve added silent movies, foreign films, early talkies, B musicals of the 1940s, film noirs (or is that films noir?) and more.
The first edition covered movies made until 1960; by moving our cutoff date to 1965 we’ve added 1,200 additional films, many of which will no longer appear in the bulging Annual Movie Guide. (Incidentally, you can find all these writeups on our iPhone app, where page count is not a factor.)
As a diehard old-movie buff, I loved having an opportunity to write new reviews of vintage films I’ve screened over the past five years and retool existing entries, as well. My colleagues and I still had to make tough choices, since we didn’t have unlimited space, but we’ve included a great many films now available on DVD and playing periodically on Turner Classic Movies. I hope you’ll find this expanded volume useful to consult and fun to browse.
