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The Book on Movies: Essential Film Books

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The Book on Movies: Essential Film Books

POSTED: Monday, October 4, 2010, 3:55 PM

Carrie Rickey, Film Critic

Mark Harris' excellent Pictures from a Revolution charts the fault line between Old Hollywood and New.

The British Film Institute polled film critics and scholars to name essential film books and here are the results, including biography, criticism, Hollywood portraits, history, memoir and theory.

For me, the essential film biographies are The Biographical Dictionary of Cinema by David Thomson, Dietrich by Steven Bach and Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius by Donald Spoto.

In criticism, my most-thumbed volumes are The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris, 5001 Nights at the Movies by Pauline Kael, Negative Space by Manny Farber and Otis Ferguson on Film.

The keenest Hollywood portraits: The Devil's Candy by Julie Salamon, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor by Murray Schumach, Final Cut by Steven Bach, Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut and Picture by Lillian Ross.

Among film histories, From Reverence to Rape by Molly Haskell, The Parade's Gone By by Kevin Brownlow, Pictures from a Revolution by Mark Harris, The Stars by Edgar Morin and Toms, Coons Mammies, Mulattoes and Bucks by Donald Bogle.

My favorite memoirs: Every Man in His Time by Raoul Walsh, Fun in a Chinese Laundry by Joseph von Sternberg, Goodness Has Nothing to Do With It by Mae West, A Life by Elia Kazan and My Last Sigh by Luis Bunuel.

Theoretical tomes: Film Art and Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein and What is Cinema? by Andre Bazin.

Best all-round resource: Leonard Maltin's movie guides.

Which film books are your essentials?

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Comments (5)

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 4:21 PM, 10/04/2010

My Indecision Is Final by Jake Eberts; My Wicked, Wicked Ways by Errol Flynn; Indecent Exposure by David McClintick; Full Metal Jacket Diary by Matthew Modine; The Making Of Kubrick's 2001 by Jerome Agel.

— ccjroberts

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 4:28 PM, 10/04/2010

I can't believe I forgot to include "The Silent Clowns," Walter Kerr's hilarious analysis of silent comedy that has the poetry of Shakespeare and the precision of an engineer's specs.

— carrierickey

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 5:01 PM, 10/04/2010

I have to simply say "Ditto" to many of your choices, Carrie - the four books of criticism, as well as the Thomson, the Truffaut, the Haskell, the Brownlow, and the Maltin. William K. Everson's Love in Film" meant a lot to me, as did Frank Capra's "The Name Above the Title.

— wwolfe