America's Film Legacy, 2009-2010: A Viewer's Guide to the 50 Landmark Movies Added to the National Film Registry in 2009-10

Eagan made a major contribution to film studies with 2009's American Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry%E2%80%94a chronological catalogue of the first 500 selections to be preserved as among "the significant films in our motion picture history." This new book of the 50 new films displays all of the merits of Eagan's first effort: each film has a complete cast and credit list along with an entertaining and often provocative essay by Eagan in which the film isn't described in detail but rather is placed "in context" to show "how they may have been inspired by earlier films, how they compare to other movies of their time, and how they may have affected movies to come." Thus Eagan engagingly discusses Newark Athlete, a one-second, 30-frame fragment of a 1891 film by Thomas Edison that laid the groundwork for his later development of the Kinetoscope (and perhaps motion pictures themselves), with the same skill that he brings to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in The West," a 165 minute "summation of the Western form%E2%80%A6 as persuasive a vision of the West as anyone working at that time could deliver." (Nov.)