THE WHOLE EQUATION
by David Thomson
Little Brown, £22.50
SHEPPERTON BABYLON
by Matthew Sweet
Faber, £12.99
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TO SOME of David Thomson’s fellow journalists, he embodies the critic as artist. “Movie writing as literature,” enthuses one on the dust jacket of The Whole Equation. “Thomson’s writing is elegant, quirky, personal . . .”’
“Personal” is key here, and may determine whether you class Thomson as genius or charlatan. Certainly, the personality that emerged most vividly from Thomson’s biography of Orson Welles a few years ago was not Welles’s but Thomson’s own. Thomson didn’t make all those films — why does the reader want to hear about him?
The Whole Equation is cast from a similar mould, and while subtitled A History of Hollywood, resembles more a fantasia on themes from American film history. The themes include: the philosophical implications of sitting in the dark watching the light; the sociology of Los Angeles; the meaning of the film Chinatown; the marriage of art and profit motive exemplified by Hollywood.
Along the way — and the way is a long one — there are remarks on the Iraq war, on corporal punishment (“I hate the idea of beating sense into children — it is but a first step toward the concentration camp”), on Chaplin (“The tramp act is akin to the gestures of rape, even: it longs to win us, to overwhelm us”) and on nuclear weapons.
At least one reader thinks this stuff is the real deal. “Is that going too far, too fast?” asks Thomson breathlessly. “I don’t believe anyone has ever tried to explain movies this way.” Others may feel that Thomson’s aperçus are bought at a high price when so much Pseud’s Corner guff has to be swallowed. Give me impersonal any day.
Or give me Matthew Sweet. Once Sweet masters his grouchiness at the ignorance of your average film pundit, Shepperton Babylon — a partial but often brilliant survey of British film — reveals itself as a masterclass in revisionist history. Conventional wisdom, as usual, turns out not to be so sagacious after all.
Sweet sweeps from the silent era to the dizzy days of 1970s soft porn, and as well as plenty of lurid gossip offers a new light on such familiar figures as George Formby and J. Arthur Rank, as well as unfamiliar ones. Fascinating, all of it.
Christopher Wood