About the only thing Harvey really doesn’t cover in the ’87 book was the “pre-Code” era, because that term didn’t really exist then. I would suggest complenenting Harvey’s book with Mick LaSalle’s two volumes on pre-Cide, “Complicated Women” and the slightly less interesting “Dangerous Men.”

I love Thomson’s book (that did make my top 10) and I prize it for its cantankerousness and individuality…I wouldn’t like it nearly so much if it were more fair-minded and even-handed. And I share his curmudgeony frustration with contemporary cinema, though I’d like to think I am far more hopeful for its future than he is.

*A note to all your readers: I am planning to compile a master list of everyone’s favorite books, but to do so I need blog links – so if you have a blog, please put your personal list up on your blog and then I can link up to it when I comprise the “canon”…so to speak.

And what of Stephen Kings’ DANSE MACABRE?

Hell, I’d settle for one of those pop critic omnibus tomes that give even a paragraph to the most obscure films ( be it dogbone or Ebert ).

For digging into obscurity read THEY HAD FACES THEN by Springer and Hamilton.

A typical night might be “Widmark After Dark” with “Kiss of Death” and “Panic in the Streets” featuring interviews with Widmark, Henry Hathaway and Coleen Gray. A look at set design followed “Dodsworth”. Jack Elam sat around talking about Sam after “The Wild Bunch”. Joel McCrea discussing Hitch and Sturges as we watched a double bill of “Foreign Correspondent” and “The Palm Beach Story”.

I’d say it’s right down your street.

Medusa – I’m always fascinated how people become addicted to movies, it’s usually some dusty old reference book like you mentioned, instilling the urge to see everything! (and let me recommend TCMDB over IMDB. Sure I’m shilling, but it uses the AFI database, which is far more accurate).

Moira – Thomson is a strange case, such an elegant writer, but so closed off. I don’t feel I ever learn much from him (except about his taste).

And to each his own Al. But Farber is in the pantheon for me. I could’ve easily chosen the Agee volume too, though…

I also enjoy these: the collected film criticism of James Agee, Robin Wood’s book on Howard Hawks and Saturday Afternoon at the Bijour by David Zinman. Books published by Leslie Halliwell and David Shipman have also been very helpful.

Agee once reviewed the Burt Lancaster vehicle I Walk Alone by saying it was one of a handful of films that deserved to walk alone, carry a little bell and cry “Unclean, unclean!”

Here’s my list:
1. Confessions of a Cultist by Andrew Sarris.
2. The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris.
3. The 50 Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood by Erza Goodman.
4. I Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael – and some of her other writings.
5. The Pyramid collection of small books about movie stars (Director Andrew Bergman wrote about Cagney, Jeanine Bassinger wrote about Shirley Temple, etc.)
6. The Portable Dorothy Parker.
7. The collection of 1970s books about movie stars written and/or edited by James Robert Parrish.
8. Easy Riders Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind.
9. Kings of the Bs, edited by Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn.
10. Books that various publishing companies put out that listed the films made by individual studios – The MGM Story, The RKO Story, The Universal Story, etc.

Some thoughts:
Goodman was a reporter who soured on Hollywood; his book has many wonderful stories about Hollywood. I’m not the Pauline Kael fan that I used to be; I once wrote and told her that and she sent me a gracious note back. Sarris, the studio books, Kings of the Bs and the books by Parrish have been essential in my learning about the movies.
The first movie book I bought was about Samuel Fuller. Sad to say, I don’t have it any more.

Even though I can often disagree with Thomson’s quirky and informed choices in his eclectic compendium, sometimes the man captures a quality of a figure just perfectly, as he did in his description of Robert Flaherty as a man who “explored to escape” or describing a Diana Dors documentary as “a lovely tribute to getting it all wrong.” When I began reading him, it took awhile before I realized this is just one man’s lively, cultivated and highly subjective opinion about something that he passionately believed mattered–the influence of film on society and an individual, (himself, even though his words can read like “the voice of God”, not just another movie fan).

Maybe you’re right about his tepid approach to contemporary cinema. Perhaps he should add the word “Classic” before the film in the title?