John DiLeo’s SCREEN SAVERS II Releases May 1, 2012

On May 1, 2012 Hansen Publishing Group releases John DiLeo’s fifth film book: Screen Savers II: My Grab Bag of Classic Movies. It will be available as a trade paperback for $24.95 and as an ebook for $9.99.

Screen Savers II: My Grab Bag of Classic Movies, a new film book by five-time author John DiLeo, is a partial sequel to DiLeo’s 2007 book Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery, which focused on underrated great movies and was organized by genre.  His new book uses his Screen Savers format for ten more extensive and perceptive essays on neglected gems, among them the marvelous British thriller The Fallen Idol (1948), the dazzling murder melodrama Ivy (1947), and four outstanding westerns:  Branded (1950), starring Alan Ladd; The Furies (1950), starring Barbara Stanwyck; The Far Country (1955), starring Jimmy Stewart; and Ride the High Country (1962), starring Joel McCrea.  McCrea is a favorite of DiLeo’s, and the author makes a convincing case for the actor as one of the Golden Age’s best and most underappreciated stars.  DiLeo also includes long pieces on McCrea pictures These Three (1936), Primrose Path (1940), and The Palm Beach Story (1942), highlighting the actor’s versatility, his realistic and ageless acting style, and his deft comic underplaying.  The final film in this section is a fairly recent one, Two Family House (2000), which DiLeo addresses in a personal and fascinating manner, from his perspective as an Italian-American.  As in the first Screen Savers, DiLeo makes you eager to see all of these films, arming you with his insights, passion, and encyclopedic knowledge.

The second section of his “grab bag” is a collection of selected posts from his classic-film blog screensaversmovies.com.  Newly organized by chapters, and presented in diary form, these posts were written between 2008 and 2011.  They cover a wide range of film topics, from memorial tributes and centenary celebrations to capsule reviews of movies both old and new, great and terrible, famous and obscure.  Even without the longer format of the first section’s essays, DiLeo’s breezy, lively writing provides consistent illumination, humor, and wisdom.

The final item in the “grab bag” is a section of movie-trivia matching quizzes, in the format of DiLeo’s first book, And You Thought You Knew Classic Movies! (1999). Witty, clever, and amusing (and often quite funny), these quizzes are both a playful memory bender and a crash course in Hollywood facts.  DiLeo incorporates such things as great food-and-drink moments in classics, fictional titles of books and plays that appear in movies, and other items to drive any film fanatic happily mad.

Screen Savers II is an unpretentious film book that is deceptively scholarly.  As you enjoy page after page, you may not realize just how much you are learning about the movies, not just their history but how to watch them more alertly, how to see and experience as much as John DiLeo does.  His enthusiasm for his subject is enveloping and infectious.