In 1999, my good friend John DiLeo published a book entitled
And You Thought You Knew Classic Movies—an
entertaining tome packed with quizzes on the subject of classic film, with
plenty of esoteric queries that were guaranteed to trip up even the most
devoted TCM -phile. No less a movie authority than the late
Pauline Kael gushed (and rightly so) with praise for John’s work, calling it “the
smartest quiz book I’ve ever seen.”
The book has been OOP for a good many years, but has
recently been reissued (with a bit of additional tweaking and additions)
through Hansen Publishing, and they were nice enough to send me a promotional freebie. In fact, when John e-mailed me to ask if I’d
mention it on the blog in exchange for a gratis copy I asked him if this was
the same one for which Madame Kael had so much praise.
He e-mailed me back and confirmed my query, adding that Kael’s
rave was “the gift that keeps on giving.”
While I’m sure Pauline and I would probably clash over our taste in
movies, I’d like to think that we’d bond over our mutual approval for John’s
book. It is one of the smartest movie quiz books out there, and many of the
questions even flummoxed yours truly…here’s an example of some of them:
Katharine Hepburn
stars in what play at the climax of Stage
Door?
Can you name the
classic in which a cigarette is put out in a jar of cold cream?
What star (not Alan
Ladd) is the top-billed male in This Gun
for Hire?
At the risk of shaming myself, I only got two out of three
of these right…I won’t tell you which one I missed. (Though I will give you a hint and just say I
may have to sit down and watch Stage
Door again one of these nights after the ‘rents are sleeping soundly from
the sedagive.)
And You Thought You Knew Classic Movies contains 200 quizzes, all covering a variety of different vintage
film areas…and while I’ve not had time to take them all, I believe more than a few
of them would even baffle the Oracle himself, Robert "Bobby Osbo" Osborne. (I’ll just wait for the lightning to subside.) There’s a scoring system in the back of the
book that made me laugh out loud with the description for those folks only able
to score 0-250 points: “’Sorry, Wrong Number’ – It’s okay to admit that the only
pre-1970 movies you really care about are The
Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful
Life.” (On the other hand, I hear Entertainment Weakly Weekly is
hiring.)
I’ve been a big fan of John’s writing since November 2008,
when I found a mention of his book Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery on cocktail king Vince Keenan’s
weblog. I quickly added it and another DiLeo
book, 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember – But Probably Don’t, to my Amazon.com wish list…where
loyal sister Debbie located them and gifted me with copies for that following Christmas. 100 Great Film Performances is the only one of John’s books not
published through Hansen, but it is one I would recommend without hesitation—it’s
very similar to the content in Danny Peary’s Alternate
Oscars, and both are necessary tonics to anyone disgruntled by the outcome
of the various Academy Awards presentations year after year.
Screen Savers is
my favorite of John’s books; I have always argued that the mark of a great
critic is to write about a movie in such a fashion that s/he makes you want to
take a second look at it to see if there might possibly be something you missed
the first time. There are plenty of
those movies in Screen Savers, and
well-written essays on longtime Thrilling
Days of Yesteryear favorites, too—The
Killing, Pretty Poison, Stars in My Crown and many, many more. The success of that book led DiLeo to publish
a sequel last year, Screen Savers II: My Grab Bag of Classic Movies—which contains more flicks awaiting rediscovery,
tidbits and essays written about classic films (culled from John’s blog, Screen Savers Movies), and a few more brain busters in the area of the same kind of quizzes
featured in And You Thought You Knew
Classic Movies.
Tennessee Williams devotees will also clutch to their bosom
(well, I had to get a little sex into this review) a book written by John and
published in 2010: Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors. The publication is crammed with
the kind of movie writing DiLeo does best; examining those actors who gave
career-defining performances in vehicles based on the famed playwright’s works,
like Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.
You can find more information on John’s publications and what he does
when he’s not writing good books at his website here.
4 comments:
Awesome post! I'm going to check out that quiz book right now :D
Gosh those books sound good...I already placed orders for both "Screen Savers". I love pushing unknown film gems on other people too, so I'd like to see what John DiLeo's choices are. Thanks for sharing these titles with us!
The quiz book sounds great. But I only knew the answer to the "This Gun for Hire" question, though I should've gotten all three! This does not bode well for my success for the rest of the book! LOL
This book sounds like a must-have. Sadly, I didn't know the answers to any of these questions... See? This is why I need the book.
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