Book Review: Joe Leydon's Guide to Essential Movies You Must See

Joe Leydon's Guide to Essential Movies You Must See If You Read, Write About or Make Movies. Joe Leydon. Michael Wiese Productions. 2004. 306 pages. ISBN: 0941188922. Available from Amazon.com for only $9.98!

Every once in a while a good book comes along that is sabotaged by an inappropriate title. Such is the case with Joe Leydon's Guide. If you're an average movie viewer, a title that purports to be *only for people who read, write about, or make movies, is going to turn you off. You're going to think that Leydon analyzes each film to death, and writes in a dry, polysyllabic, academic way that will be of no interest to you.

Not so. Leydon, an award-winning film critic, adjunct professor at the University of Houston and Houston Community College, and host of the MovingPictureShow.com website, has all the credentials for academia, but his writing here is geared for the masses.

The movies he includes"defined genres, influenced filmmakers, and still serve as standards by which other films are measured."

He chooses a half dozen or so movies for each genre illustrated. The Silents, Americana, Men and Women, Song and Dance, Westward Ho, Cinemafantastique, The Master of Suspense, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Action, Funny Business, Foreign Influences, and Beyond the Mainstream.

The Master of Suspense section is devoted to the classics of Alfred Hitchcock: Notorious, Vertigo, North By Northwest and Psycho, which is only right given Hitchcock's seminal influence on the genre, but the other sections have a wider range of filmmakers on display.

For each of the 64 movies he discusses, he gives historical background, information of interest about the movie makers, and delves into the film behind the film.