A Pictorial History of the Movies
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A Pictorial History of the Movies is an engaging visual chronicle of the American movie from its beginnings to now, with incidental human-interest captions by Deems Taylor, of all people. As Mr. Taylor himself suggests, it is a book to be looked at rather than read. The fun begins when you look through the pictures of all the movies you remember (and some that you’d forgotten) and find the place where you can say, “This is where I came in.” You stop history for a time and appraise that moment. Then you start turning the pages again and other memories start floating in, and pretty soon you’re in a rose-colored phantasmagoria of yesterday. It sensibly makes no attempt to be a comprehensive history, which it isn’t; as a survey it is uncritical; and as an analysis of movie trends it is gossamer. But none of that matters. It is a souvenir program not only of fifty-five years of movies: it is also, in a curious way, a souvenir program of oneself.
You will have to pick up the book yourself and open it to any page to discover the extraordinarily hypnotic effect of this catalogue of one’s years of escape. The fact that it is pictures, and that one has associations with almost all the 700-odd pictures, adds to the Olympian omniscience which a perusal of the book affords. Topping all this, the fact that the pictures are necessarily “stills” gives them a nostalgic potential far greater than seeing old films run off: you arrest the moment, actually “capture” the memory, and, in addition, thanks to a voluminous index, you know where you can always find it again. A Pictorial History of the Movies is a veritable warehouse of memories. Simon and Schuster, $3.95.
SCHUYLER WATTS