Do you like old movies? Do you wonder how the whole movie industry got started?

Now that I got your attention, let's go to the matter of this wonderful book. It's a large "coffee table" type of book, all the pictures are in balck and white - even the wonderful close-up of Liz Taylor in "Reflections in a Golden Eye" and it is quite marvelous to look through.

The book starts off the invention of the "moving pictures" by Edison with the help of his assistant Dickson. It moves from Penny Arcades or Peep Shows (didn't the meaning of that phrase change over the years?) on to kinetoscope and George Melies. There are scenes from everything from "The Great Train Robbery" as well as "Midnight Cowboy" with many stops inbetween.

There are stills from films of the Nickelodeon age - "Gertie the Dinosaur". one of the first animated films, as well as "The Fighting Roosevelts". There are the reports of the public reaction to "Birth of a Nation" and Griffith's answer to such reports. I was amazed to learn that Harold LLoyd's "human fly" stunt (in "Safety Last", a great film if you can find it) was done with no trick photography, no stunt doubles and onaly a net netween the star of the movie and the street below. That makes that scene seem totally different when you know there wasn't much room to make a mistake.

Of course, the book has many stills of the movies of the Marx Brothers, postwar musicals as well as features on such stars as Eliazabeth Taylor, Sidney Portier and Marilyn Monroe. Various movie styles are featured with stills of the more famous (and not so famous) actors of that type. It is basically a visual encyclopedia of film history.

If you like older movies and want the information on how various effects were accomplished or you want to see pictures of Joan Crawford from various stages of her career, this is the book for you. You can use it as a reference or just look through it on those days and nights when there seems to be nothing good on tv or at the movies. Find it and enjoy it.