It wasn’t just that a film had to be jolly entertaining to obtain the highest rating, it also had to have something special about its production which set it apart from other great films.  One thinks of the montage effects in Potemkin, or the zither music in The Third Man, or the remarkable earthquake sequence in San Francisco.  Whilst a film could indeed be one of Halliwell’s personal favourites, if it didn’t have that extra something to elevate it to classic status required by the above definition then it would remain a three-star film.  So the difference between three and four star films was smaller than the difference between two and three star films, which is amply demonstrated by the book Halliwell’s Hundred in which he selects all his favourites, and many of the four-star films listed below do not appear.  As he says in the introduction, he admires the likes of Eisenstein without loving them.

          Over the lifetime of the Guide LH awarded 153 films his highest rating of four stars.  Some didn’t appear in the earlier editions; some were demoted along the way – with a major cull occurring between the 6th and 7th editions – but only three were ever promoted: Napoleon (1927), The Band Wagon (1953) and (ahem) Dumbo (1941).  The final total for the 7th Edition was 129.

          The following outlines the differences in each edition with links to a page on each film showing LH’s assessment and the contributions he felt were of a particularly high standard, indicated by the use of italics* in the Guide.  The assessments and the italics changed from time to time as LH continued to re-evaluate films for each edition and these differences are also noted.