The B List: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love

Are you a fan of movies? Not just any movies, but those cult classics, such as Rocky Horror Picture Show, or the low-budget movies that are showcased in Grindhouse? If you are a movie fan at all, you should definitely take a look at a new book called The B List. Edited by David Sterritt and John Anderson, this book consists of a series of short essays on various films, B movies in which the authors find some value and quality. It's also a nice tour through the bottom level of film's history looking for some gems that almost nobody has seen. The book is divided into a number of categories, from film noir to "neo-noir" to sci-fi classics and road movies and many more. Thus, we get an eclectic mix of movie recommendations (the only one that's really not a recommendation is Roger Ebert's essay on Pink Flamingos, which he originally did not give a rating to and explains that he did not because "stars seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact. Or perhaps as an object."). These are movies that, despite the fact that many have fallen by the wayside, the authors feel deserve recognition. I've been a fan of Roger Ebert's for a long time, so it was a pleasure to see that he contributed five essays to the book. However, the rest of the entries in the book are also very good. As is usual with any book that has many contributors, some articles are better than others, but I can honestly say that there wasn't one that I found badly written. All of the authors are noted film critics, and all of them have presented thoughtful treatises on the pictures on question. Readers of The B List will find many ideas for movies to rent the next time they are at the video store. However, you will have to do a lot of the research yourself. It's almost criminal that a book like this rarely mentions, and only in passing if it does, whether a movie is out on DVD or not. Many of the older movies might not be, and a notation would have been very helpful. The authors are singing the praises of these movies; you would think they would want to make it easier for the reader to find them so they can revel in the juicy filmic goodness as well. Sadly, you're on your own. Despite this failing, The B List is an excellent collection of film commentary. The love for these movies shines through in almost every essay, and the writers do a good job of intriguing you into doing that search. So forget those big budget blockbusters for a moment, those "live-action" films that are more computer graphics than anything else. Take a walk through the seedy underbelly of Hollywood, take a gander at films that bend the genre just a little bit, or are made so cheaply that the quality of the story has to take you through it. Pick this book up, find something you might be interested in, and give it a try. I think you'll be glad you did. David Roy

B-movies of the studio era were like step children-- members of the family, yet few adults paid much attention to where they went or what they did. The result was usually unmemorable, just like what most kids do to pass the time. But sometimes the result, less cluttered by the do's and don'ts of conventional moviemaking, produced genuinely novel entertainment deemed too risky for broader audience appeal. Those are the hidden gems B-movie lovers treasure. The book is a respectable addition to that library, especially for those developing an interest in our obscure movie past. Many of the standard gems are included, particularly the noirs--Out of the Past (1947), Gun Crazy (1949), Detour (1945), for example. However, several lesser known noirs like Crime Wave (1954) and the astonishingly cost-effective Murder by Contract (1958) also appear. Now I confess to being something of a purist. B-movies typically played the bottom-half of double features in the 30's, 40's & 50's, were in black & white, and were nearly always products of the studio system. Those are the ones I treasure because they usually ran up against the dead hand of studio censorship, causing their makers to finesse as best they could. In the case of Gun Crazy, for example, the friction resulted in a fascinating series of images subtly blending two of censorship's biggest no-no's, sex and violence. The result is a riveting noir that comes closer to revealing our national obsessions than any A-production of the period. Put another way, if A-productions revealed what we were supposed to see, it was a B-movie like Gun Crazy that revealed what we sneakily wanted to see. Anyway, the book expands beyond purist confines to include low-budgeters and cult films through the early 2000's, such as Reservoir Dogs (1992), Rocky Horror Show (1975), The Core (2003), et. al. Many of the newer ones I haven't seen; at the same time, the book shows me helpfully why I should. Most movie genres are covered, including musicals, politicals, Westerns, and weirds. Somehow, comedies got left out and I'm still wondering why. That durable farce from 1945, Up in Mabel's Room, would have been a good comedic place to start. Of course, which films are chosen for inclusion can always be second-guessed. For example, my all-time classic, DOA (1950), is left out-- but then, some classics are bound to be left out. On the other hand, whether an elaborate production like Platoon should be included-- as it is-- remains debatable. Nonetheless, the choices strike me on the whole as reasonable ones, perhaps not optimal, but at least reasonable. Editors Sterritt and Anderson provide properly irreverant intro's to each section. The articles themselves from professional critics are by and large both entertaining and informative. However, readers looking for heavyweight or academic analytics will probably be disappointed. Most essays reflect a sprightly journalistic-style approach and run no more than 4 pages, hardly enough r

It has to be said that the title of this latest compilation from the National Society of Film Critics is more than a little misleading. Pretty much every major dictionary defines the phrase "B Movie" in more or less the same terms: a low budget film, often of poor quality, originally made to accompany the main feature in a double billing. However, in the introduction to this collection of brief essays, the editors provide completely different definition: "Today, we assert in this volume, [the B Movie] is a more inclusive category, embracing films that fall out of the mainstream by dint of their budgets, their visions, their grit, and frequently...their lack of what the culture cops call 'good taste.'" This is a definition so vague and sweeping that one could fit almost any film under its umbrella, which renders it a totally meaningless. A more accurate title could be made by chopping off the front of the book's subtitle, leaving "Cult Classics We Love" -- although even that doesn't account for some of the non-cult movies discussed ("The Core" and "Platoon" being notable examples). The book contains about sixty essays, only five of which appear to be exclusive to the book, with the rest having previously been published in various magazines and web outlets. The editors have tried gamely to group the essays into ten sections, some of which make sense (Film Noir, Neo-Noir, Science Fiction, Horror, Westerns) and some of which don't (Political Pictures, Cult Classics, Midnight Movies). I could have done without such attempts to categorize and would have been glad to take the movies in chronological order. This might allow the reader to trace some interesting cultural shifts along the way instead of finding the films shoehorned into preassigned categories. Almost all the obvious recent "cult" films are included (eg. Pink Flamingos, Rocky Horror, etc.), but even readers of the type who would be attracted to such a book will likely find plenty to add to their Netflix queue. (Personally, I've seen roughly 2/3 of the films covered in the essays.) As with any book of this nature, the essays vary wildly in both tone and quality, from thoughtful and probing analysis to rah-rah fanboyisms. It has to be said that there are far too many essays that reveal the particulars of the plot. So, if you don't like spoilers, you're better off taking the table of contents as your viewing guide, and not reading about a film until you've seen it. Still, on the whole, a decent little mainstream introduction to some of American cinema's intriguing nooks and crannies.

The reviews are brief but wow did they do a great job picking the films to be in this collection. Being an editor for the Film Noir of the Week blog I was interested in the film noir and neo-noir films in the book and they don't disappoint. Some excellent writers here. An excellent addition to my film book collection.

Sequelitis struck books long before it began to strike movies, but books about movies seem particularly prone to follow-ups; a condition, perhaps, of cinema's perpetual status as a work in progress. (Never mind digital video, when do we get the holographic porn?) A few years ago, the National Society of Film Critics compiled THE A LIST (Da Capo, 2002), a collection of rah-rah essays in praise of "100 essential films." By way of answering the question, "what does it mean to call a film 'essential'?", the canonical directors were given an essay or two apiece: Kubrick, Ozu, Ford, Murnau, Godard, Scorcese, Kiarostami, et cetera; but hip as alternative newsweekly film critics tend to be, their A list already included plenty of B movie landmarks, including an Anthony Mann western, a Douglas Sirk melodrama, George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (the only film awarded two essays, one in each book), and the big screen debuts of pop culture icons Bruce Lee and Elvis Presley. The editors of the present volume take hipness as their starting point. No budget is too shoestring, no story too derivative of earlier movies, no hero too ambivalent towards (or contemptuous of) authority for the National Society, whose members, collectively defining the term "film snob", are at their best when reading politics, preferably anti-establishment, into the bottom half of a double bill; at their weakest when claiming to find echoes of Shakespearean romance in "Son of Kong" (1933). (If you're hungry for political film criticism, don't miss Peter Biskind's classic book "Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties".) They wear their enthusiasms on their scruffy sleeves. That enthusiasm, and the wit and the hard-edged love with which it's expressed, is what makes this book so damned entertaining. Consider the challenge of identifying a cinematic sub-genre with only the dubious aesthetic parallels between Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" (1974) and the Quentin Tarentino/Robert Rodriguez twofer, "Grindhouse" (2007) to guide you. The editors have divided the fifty-nine chosen films into eleven categories, from the obvious (film noir, road movies) to the amorphous ("political pictures", anyone?), with the Sadean ethos of provocation and transgression informing every page in the book. Of course THE B LIST wouldn't be worth a damn if it didn't make you want to pop movie after movie into your DVD drive, and it succeeds at this with a vengeance. Whether "Gun Crazy" or "Two-Lane Blacktop" or "The Brother From Another Planet" were really all that good the last time I saw them is almost beside the point. I certainly wasn't thinking about them like this, and that's the beauty of good (i.e., passionate, well-written, philosophically and aesthetically informed) criticism. It's eye-opening in every sense of the term.