You might define an essential critic as one who invariably starts an argument that you feel like joining in or against. English-born, San Francisco-based film historian David Thomson is one such critic, a delightful don who has produced some two dozen volumes including a couple of hugely addictive reference works that would make excellent gifts for a film lover, especially a student just gaining an appreciation for the possibilities of the medium.
Thomson was in New York recently to talk movies (it’s refreshing to hear a native Englishman use the word, which back in Britannia is usually eschewed in favor of the stuffier “films”) as he promotes his landmark work, “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” and I’ll break up our conversation into blog posts and pass along some of his insights and opinions in coming days. “TNBDoF” has just been published in an updated fifth edition which contains new entries on emerging talents such as Judd Apatow as well as reappraisals of developing filmmakers such as George Clooney, whose entry was almost entirely rewritten since the previous edition six years ago. Thomson’s other crazily entertaining reference volume, “Have You Seen…?” is a sort of graduate-level take on the Leonard Maltin movie guide, limiting itself to pagelong essays on the top 1000 most important movies.
I keep both of these volumes close at hand in my living room where I often watch HBO and TCM’s most interesting offerings. Mistake! In watching a film, I often find myself looking up Thomson’s take on it (in “Have You Seen…?”) or on its star or director (in “TNBDoF”), get enveloped in his line of argument (sometimes in vehement agreement, not infrequently finding myself in the contrary condition), follow the trail to cross-references and…lose the thread of the movie I’m watching.
Pick up either volume and select a title or talent at random and you’ll see how erudite, generous, cheeky, elegant and fascinating Thomson’s writing is. Here he is on “Wall Street”: “What does it say of [Oliver] Stone that he loves to have his cake and eat it, to wallow in the darker side of life and to be disapproving of that self-indulgence? He is our Cecil B. DeMille.” On “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane”: “warring gargoyles…they were two grotesques, the opposite arrows in a classic sado-masochistic relationship…Even more than ‘Sunset Blvd.,’ it treated old Holllywood as a deranged waxworks show. [Joan] Crawford would make another five pictures and they were all exercises in horror.” Indeed. For someone who grew up on the movies shown late at night in the 1970s, in fact, Joan Crawford simply was a horror actress. Who knew there was anything else to her career?
I have “TNBDoF” open at the midpoint on my lap. Take any entry and it’s impossible not to want to read to the finish. Take that goggle-eyed madman Klaus Kinski: “He sounds like a fictional being–a nomadic actor taken from Rimbaud and Celine, so driven that he gave up on such bourgeois concepts as destination or direction….few actors trying to be great would deny their secret knowledge that the art, the profession, whatever, is demented and deranging. Kinski’s originality was in living that secret to the full.” On Kevin Kline: “No one quite knows why Kevin Kline hasn’t made it bigger in movies. He’s very versatile — he has terrific, wild comic energy and a rare ability to be alarming, as well as the basic good looks and intelligence….somehow he remains a marginal figure, never dominant, never truly displayed by a film. Is he too smart to relax with the camera?” Nastassja Kinski: “There was a moment, in the early eighties, when Kinski was the rage, a sensation…the most beautiful girl in the world. Her greatest interest may be in pioneering the new brevity of such rages.” As the French would say, “C’est exact.”