A Biographical Dictionary of Film
By David Thomson
Knopf, 834 pages, $40, $25 paper
With the third edition of his film dictionary, totally revised and enlarged from his 1975 edition, David Thomson extends the scope of his career as film critic; a career to which the extension of territory has been essential. As contributor to Film Comment magazine, as teacher of filmmaking and documentary filmmaker, Thomson has been preoccupied with film’s ongoing dialogue with reality. He sees documentary film as shaping filmmaking’s vocation and destiny; witness his essays on Ken Burns (“The Civil War,” “Baseball”) and Britain’s Alan Clarke (“Scum,” “The Firm”). But this conviction by no means bridles Thomson’s tastes. As his writing eloquently demonstrates-in essays like his polemical lament on the derelictions of the Western film-he is nagged and beset by the falling short of Hollywood filmmakers on their side of the traffic with the real.
Thomson came to these shores from England via Australia, and his loving restlessness with film’s limitations is buttressed no doubt by a gifted immigrant’s bridling at barriers, his impatience for space. This is not to say that Thomson has doctrinaire views; the disposition that emerged in the essays and that the present book confirms is bountiful and heartening. What he does bring to the task, though, is judgment-that prejudice indispensable to criticism because it houses the critic’s ethical-moral experience-and taste in the deepest sense, as engaging human concern and rapport.
His small “c” catholicity is the more impressive given the strong principles that secure it at center. He honors the authority of imagination, which the film weds to reality, and he seeks a generosity and honesty of imagination to match his own. He discovers it in a variety of performances and mindsets; not only in the work of Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Kenji Mizoguchi or Roberto Rosselini but also in that of Leo McCarey, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks and, forsooth, John Milius.
The thousand inclusions, ranging from near squibs to brief but usually resonant essays, offer us not only Thomson’s range but also a refreshed sense of scale for one’s own awareness of films. Immersed in history, Thomson is aware that many inclusions in such a volume require no more than to be included and noted. Yet he is ever on the lookout against a parade ground of etceteras.
His concern with the inescapable small figures of history enables him to discover sprigs of green in the generally gray careers of inconsiderable or problematic figures. He can articulate the almost amorphous chronicle of that will-o’-the-wisp Robert Florey, whose 1930s careers as a director at Universal and Paramount flicker maddeningly with hints of distinctive film intelligence. Thomson can also lend a shimmer of insight to a stubby paragraph with a single word. “Astringent,” pinned to Pat O’Brien’s career-bio, redeems a near lifetime of St. Patrick’s Day jokes. “Knowingness” serves Ann Sheridan’s account much the same, although no replacement for the many additional words warranted by that remarkable screen personality.
Along with appreciation, he brings important qualifications to his accounts of worthy B-filmmakers like Val Lewton and Anthony Mann-who, by common critical tendency, are either dismissed or ensconced in mini-shrines. Thomson’s awareness of formula’s impositions on filmmakers gives both edge and authority to his eager sympathy with skill and taste in a variety of contexts. Yet he is continually dogged by such limitations and their incursions into a filmmaker’s work.
His wholehearted encomium of director Jacques Tourneur, with the demurrers that Thomson finds unavoidable, is an emblem of his tough humility. And, although one might voice a reservation or two on the worldwide scope of this dictionary, Thomson’s outreachings provide us with the infectious excitement of his reflections on the innovative Feuillade, from French film’s first decade; his more measured recognition of Abel Gance; his gesture of honor for the sadly truncated career of the fine Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjoberg.
We can likewise enjoy his pruning and paring of the taller and leafier eminences on our shores; his well-honed sensibility finding new areas ripe for reconsideration. Such is his at times marvelling yet regretful appraisal of Mickey Rooney:
“(He) is important, and yet he is ridiculous; it is in the pitch of his absurdity that he is significant. One feels like a coroner presented with a cadaver shot through the heart, poisoned, thrown off a cliff, and with a bad heart. Rooney could have died long ago from sheer disbelief: he lives on.”
On Bogart, “central to the idea of identification in the cinema,” he offers a keen-eyed reappraisal:
” `How can a man so ugly be so handsome?’ asks Marta Toren of Bogart in `Sirocco.’ Perhaps only if that man has a high enough regard for himself. . . . If millions go to the movies to persuade themselves that they are Humphrey Bogart, why should Bogart himself not share in that illusion? This last trap is the greatest test of stars in the cinema, and Bogart falls heavily into it. . . . He made few wholly satisfactory films . . .and failed in a variety of parts outside the narrow range he saw fit for himself. But within that range he had the impact of Garbo or James Dean.”
Thomson excels at defining the co-relation of performer and public image, with a generally sympathetic yet unblurred eye for the way film can exploit an actor’s very limitations (as in the case of Kim Novak).
Thomson displays what I suspect is a British capacity for familiarity both candid and gracious, which is as vigorously democratic as anything stateside. He is notably without malice, though he can be briskly severe, or warmly indignant, as in much of his Frank Capra assessment.
In a project of this volume, which must have goaded his patience more than occasionally, Thomson rarely strikes me as unjust, although I believe that he bravely misreads Andrei Tarkovsky, especially “Andrei Roublev”-a film of medieval art and faith to compare with the best of Mizoguchi (not with Minnelli’s “Lust for Life”!).
There is, however, one instance of misjudgment in “A Biographical Dictionary of Film” that far exceeds difference of opinion: Thomson’s scorched earth treatment of John Ford. Making single exception for “The Searchers,” Thomson hurtles through film after film, decrying, dismissing and villifying Ford’s art and sense of humanity:
“The Ford philosophy is a rambling apologia for unthinking violence . . . disguised by the sham legends of old men fuddled by drink and glory. The visual poetry so often attributed to Ford seems to me claptrap in that it amounts to prettification of a lie-. . . the long lines of cavalry, the lone figure in Monument Valley, the homestead interior, as airy and vulgar as gravure advertisements for kitchenware. . . . It is sometimes claimed that Ford is a superb visual storyteller; . . . the same could be said for Leni Riefenstahl. The glorification of Ford’s simplicity as an artist should not conceal the fact that his message is trite, callous, and evasive.”
I must attest that I am not a John Ford devotee nor ever have been. A number of his Western films impress me as stodgy pageantry. Yet my every encounter with interviews and reports of Ford convince me of a decent, openhearted and rightly self-respecting man-the author, moreover, of several beautiful films long preceding “The Searchers”: “Arrowsmith,” “Young Mr. Lincoln,” “The Prisoner of Shark Island,” “Drums Along the Mohawk,” “The Long Voyage Home.”
In contrast to his overall performance, the body of Thomson’s onslaught on Ford seems stenciled all over with Holy War, which I find depressing and disconcerting. I remain persuaded, though, that the carnage of the Ford coverage is simply an expression of that prejudice I have cited as indispensable to the fortitude and authority of Thomson’s criticism. It is moved by a ferocious sense of oppression by the deadwood of baleful cliches, of unthinkingly assimilated attitudes-to which, unavoidably, he sometimes overreacts.
I find in Thomson’s work the lineage of at least two great American film critics, James Agee and Manny Farber-Agee’s priestly sense of revelation in observed and recorded actuality, Farber’s scavenging, ransacking exploration of the twin languages, word and image. All three are creators in their own right: poet, artist, historian. Thomson carries his predecessors’ terrain further than ever, assuring that future moviegoers will find themselves that much less in the dark.
