Learning on ScreenLeslie Halliwell and His Film Guides
Halliwell’s Horizon: Leslie Halliwell and His Film Guides, by Michael Binder (Lulu Press, July 2011), 302 pages. ISBN: 978-1447742050 (hardback) £18.99; ISBN: 978-1447748212 (paperback) £8.99; Kindle e-book: £0.99
About the Author: Dr Sheldon Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Stage and Screen Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It – The Making of the Epic Movie (Sheffield: Tomahawk Press, 2005; reprinted 2006; 2nd edition due in 2014); with Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: a Hollywood History (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and among the articles he has contributed to books and journals is a chapter on Straw Dogs in Seventies British Cinema (ed. Robert Shail, BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Self-published through the print-to-order service Lulu Press, Michael Binder’s affectionate biography of Leslie Halliwell surely deserves a more mainstream publisher, befitting its subject. Halliwell’s name is popularly enshrined in the two film reference works he created: Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion, which first appeared in 1965; and Halliwell’s Film Guide, first published in 1977. These are still familiar items on the bookshelves, though recent editions have been edited and regularly updated by John Walker since their founder’s death in 1989. However, Halliwell’s numerous other published works have all now fallen out of print and he is in danger of being remembered only by film buffs of a certain age. He was never highly regarded by the academic establishment, whose own members Halliwell often dismissed as pretentious “eggheads”, and the books themselves have to some extent been eclipsed by competitor volumes and especially by online sources such as the Internet Movie Database. This is now usually the first port of call for anyone wishing to look up the contents of an individual’s filmography or a critical star rating for an obscure movie; but Halliwell was a pioneer in the field and his reference books were, during his lifetime, entirely his own work rather than the product of a team or committee. Uniquely, therefore, they bore his idiosyncratic, somewhat irascible stamp, being permeated with the attitudes of a man dissatisfied with the “excesses” of modern cinema and forever harking back to the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, particularly the 1930s, his formative years.
Binder himself is of a younger vintage, not yet in his twenties when Halliwell died from cancer at the age of 59. The biographer was drawn to his subject from an early date by their clear affinity for old movies as well as by an envious appreciation of the concise, drily witty (if often glib) style of Halliwell’s potted career summaries and thumbnail evaluations. Binder also maintains a website devoted to Halliwell and his works, (www.lesliehalliwell.com), where he admits: ‘whilst I occasionally defect to certain online reference sources for more in-depth information, it is to the Guide I immediately turn after watching a movie, simply to find out what Halliwell thought of it. And whilst I may agree or disagree with the assessment given, it is rare that I don’t at least appreciate his point and wish that I could discuss it with him further, perhaps over a curry supper.’ Here Binder surely speaks for several generations of movie buffs weaned on the Guide and the Companion, even if they later moved on to stronger stuff. Irritable and irritating though he could be, Halliwell was his own man, a salt-and-vinegar personality who remained stubbornly engaging precisely for, as Binder points out, the consistency of his often reactionary opinions and prickly prejudices.
