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...