TEN MOVIES AT A TIME

Nonfiction

Stoking our daydreams

TEN MOVIES AT A TIME:

A 350-Film Journey Through Hollywood and America 1930-1970

By John DiLeo

407 pp. Hansen Publishing Group

Reviewed by Rebeca Schiller

Back in the mid-1990s I lived with an economist who cursed his choice of careers. His dreamed of writing novels, but he had one problem: he wasn’t a natural-born storyteller. To find his muse, he decided to watch 100 films in one month. I went along with the idea, but mentioned we needed some viewing guidelines that covered genre, directors, country of origin and so on. Out of those 100 films, I watched 84 from the opening to the ending credits. That averaged out to three movies a day while he cheated and fast-forwarded the remaining 16 films.

The outcome of that challenge? He’s still an economist, and I’m the writer. And that leads me to John DiLeo’s Ten Movies at a Time.DiLeo, the author of five other books on films, is a contributing book reviewer for the Washington Post, a weekly regular on the Arlene Bynon radio show in Toronto (on SiriusXM), and host of classic-film series and conducts film-history seminars.

When I first learned of the book, what interested me was DiLeo’s system in selecting the films he decided to watch, comment and review. Three of his chapters focus on major stars that resonated with audiences, but the essence of his selection is based on subject matter, genres, sub-genres, trends and cultural shifts.

Joan Crawford is the focus of the first chapter, “Our Jazzy Joan: Silent Sensation Turns Sound Superstar (1930-1932).” DiLeo provides some background about the actress and a good selection of her films from the early 1930s among them—my favorite and one I remember selecting for the 100-film challenge—Grand Hotel. Crawford isn’t “grand” per se in this film. She plays the stenographer hired by Wallace Beery, a boorish and brutish businessman, and in spite of co-starring with the great Greta Garbo, who plays a Russian ballerina, it’s Crawford who steals the scene with John Barrymore.

If you’re not keen about the Depression-era flicks, but are more into the films of the 1940s and 1950s, DiLeo provides great commentary about costume films in “Ruff Times: The 1940s Costume Picture (1940-1948).” In the introduction to this chapter, DiLeo writes of the studios during this time that “stoked the daydreams of all American by going backward, constructing a past of opulent beauty and lavish spectacle, far removed from everyday America.” Later, in the 1950s, Hollywood would explore the future with low-budget science-fiction—exceptions to that were The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still, DiLeo notes). The appeal of these costume films not only was the splendor, but how Hollywood—during that period—romanticized the past. Among the films highlighted in this chapter is the swashbuckling genre starring either Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power such as The Sea Hawk (1940) or The Adventures of Don Juan, both starring Errol Flynn.

It’s no secret that male actors in Hollywood have longer careers than their leading ladies, and while the likes of Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift made their mark in the 1950s, as DiLeo writes in The Men from the Boys: ’30s Icons in the Age of Rebels (1956-1960). Actors such as Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, and David Niven were still appearing in films that dealt with social issues (12 Angry Men), sexuality (Separate Tables) and evolution (Inherit the Wind), drawing audiences to theaters.

Ten Movies at a Time is an exceptional resource for film buffs. It provides enough information about the films to pique curiosity and also offers good Hollywood history for each era. Following the Siskel and Ebert ranking system, this book gets a thumb’s up.