Film reference books abound, but what makes David Thomson's different from any other is, first and
foremost, the quality of the writing. Not just in that the writing is superior for a film reference book, not even in that it is definitive and sets the standard for all others, but
in that Thomson has created something truly unique, a major work of art, a comprehensive organically evolving meditation on the state of film, that is arranged not chronologically or
thematically, as one might expect, but alphabetically, by person.
The first edition appeared in 1975, the second in 1980, and the third in 1994. So this, the fourth edition, is the latest incarnation in a project which is
effectively a lifetime's work, an A la recherche du temps perdu of film. The modular construction works well for accruing editions, and the iterative approach, since one can
modify an entry or add a new one without affecting the dynamics of its surroundings. The Dictionary is therefore a compendium of independent essays on people - the figures who
have in some way affected the face of film. Naturally they are overwhelmingly either actors or directors, but significant producers, writers, moguls, cinematographers and composers
also appear. Some have necessarily short and perfunctory entries, whilst the greats are encompassed in sweepingly lyrical flights of prose, masterly in its incisiveness and
compression.
Through this mosaic of key players, the films themselves emerge, sometimes fragmentarily from the different standpoints of the collaborators. We can find out
about Double Indemnity, for example, in the pieces on Billy Wilder, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck:
"As the double-crossing blonde wife she is marvelously sinuous and insulting, the perfect exploiter of Fred MacMurray's lazy moral
inertia. She is a presence openly inviting touching; so many handholds - ringlets, block-heeled shoes, flounced dresses, anklets, padded shoulders, and barbed remarks - that snap
shut on idly philandering hands. It is part of the American dream, a comfort to weary salesmen, that such glittering Medusas are waiting behind doors in every other home."
This is a terrific way to read about film, for films themselves are mosaics, subject to multiple revisionist interpretations dependent on how and why one is
looking. And one can read The Dictionary any way one likes, dipping in at a selected place and fanning out, as with the Double Indemnity example, or alphabetically for
short stretches, taking in, say, the careers of Farley Granger, Stewart Granger, Cary Grant, Hugh Grant, Peter Greenaway, Graham Greene, and Sydney Greenstreet. Or one can open it at
random and suddenly find oneself immersed in the stories of Fatty Arbuckle, Yul Brynner, the Lumière Brothers, the Marx Brothers, Mario Lanza, Ginger Rogers, Andy Warhol, and so on,
every portrait saying something new or casting an altered light onto a familiar place.
Like all great writers Thomson speaks for us, about matters we hold dear, and says it better than we ever could. He writes on film like a novelist or
philosopher, and his sensibilities are equally attuned to the classical in the subject, and the popular, the cultish and the experimental. He knows so much about
films of which we know little or nothing, but he also likes the films we like, and has the language to tell us why we like them. It cannot ever fail to be a pleasure to read and
re-read his dazzling analysis of a film such as Taxi Driver:
[Taxi Driver] invests its own killer with all the damaged
sensitivity of the paranoid author, so that the film turns into a warped projection of his triumph overpowering defunct codes of censorship, common sense, and the initial basis of
redeemable mankind. Film and dream have no more ominous or transcendent moment than that in Taxi Driver when Travis survives his pitched battle, returns as a hero, but still
presents a haunted face to his own rearview mirror…"
Wonderful stuff!
But there is a severe side to Thomson; he is famed for his disparagements and the searching way he feels for, and finds weaknesses. No one gets an easy ride,
and sometimes monumental figures are subject to devastating, high-handed putdowns. Fellini "was an obsessional, vacuous poseur"; Hitchcock "an impoverished inventor of
thumbscrews"; Kubrick's style "is meretricious, fussy and detachable"; and John Ford "is walled up in a tradition of helpless, rosy lament, the cinema of
distracting pipe dream".
Naturally The Dictionary has grown with time. The 2002 edition has 1300 entries, 300 more than the 1994 edition. Mainly the additions are relative
newcomers who have come into blossom in the last eight years: Gillian Anderson, Halle Berry, Cate Blanchett, Danny Boyle, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Peter Jackson, Samuel L.
Jackson, Ang Lee, Baz Luhrmann, Sam Mendes, Ewan McGregor, Haley Joel Osment, Gwyneth Paltrow, M. Night Shyamalan, Quentin Tarantino and Kate Winslet to name but a few. But there are
also the welcome additions of long-standing figures who got left out before, several in the area of horror. Christopher Lee finally makes it in at the age of eighty, though there is
no mention of The Wicker Man. And George A. Romero gets the serious treatment he deserves:
"Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead… are unforgettable and seminal works of modern America. They are also correctives to the
terrible hollowness of the Scream movies. Romero has a deep, tender belief in crippled, blighted states, and there is a haunting ambiguity in his best passages - for just as
we yearn to obliterate these living dead, so we long for their triumph and their banquet."
Aficionados of the earlier editions, such as myself, have been gagging to read the updates on the figures we love, and to see what Thomson has or hasn't
changed. And, of course, to see the important films of the last eight years run through beam of his appreciation. I was not disappointed, and I will leave the last word to Mr
Thomson:
"Pulp Fiction has rare energy, exuberant panache, and comedy - it is a self-sufficient arabesque, not so far from The Big Sleep… When, towards
the end of Pulp Fiction, the curve of the story bends back to meet itself, there is something deeply, musically satisfying - a formal magic that is also very moving… Pulp
Fiction may stand as the macabre farewell to classic American movie grace."
"The Sixth Sense… was… one of the most touching and surprising ghost stories ever put on screen, a tender portrait of a child's pained
imagination… and a very welcome sign that there might yet be a way of reclaiming soul or spirit in the defiled horror genre."
"Moulin Rouge [is] the most exhilarating movie musical since Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and just as important in showing a way ahead for
that nearly abandoned genre… [it] deserved credit for its completely theatrical world, for the bravura sweep that carries one song into another, and the wonderfully silhouetted
treatment of the players…"
"…Mulholland Drive I want to see all the time. This seemed to me, emphatically, a second masterpiece [after Blue Velvet], and the first
film in which Lynch's style was so sweet, so serene, that one went with the drive or the dream of the movie without ever feeling those old panicky questions - Where are we going?
What is it about? It's about itself and the dual process of dreaming and driving - it's also one of the greatest films ever made about the cultural devastation caused by
Hollywood."
© Roger Keen 2002
