FilmJust as jazz was born in brothels and drinking dives, so Hollywood was largely invented by uneducated slum kids who had clawed their way to the top - Louis B. Mayer had been a scrap dealer, Darryl F. Zanuck a door-to-door shirt salesman, Sam Goldwyn a blacksmith's boy, while rumour has it that Clark Gable began his career as a prostitute.
The wonder, in both jazz and the movies, the two great popular art forms of the 20th century, is that so much grace and beauty should have been generated out of such humble materials. David Thomson, as fine a film critic as ever stumbled starry-eyed out of a press-showing at 10 a.m. on a wet Saturday morning, prizes cinema above all for its essential vulgarity. He bows low in homage before the likes of Bresson or Ozu, but there is no doubt where his true love lies. He can wax as lyrical over Rio Bravo or Bringing Up Baby as he does over Le Journal d'un Curé de Campagne or Tokyo Monogatari. For Thomson, the movies are the people's poetry.
A Londoner who first saw Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 at the Granada, Tooting - "a huge and fabulously decorated cinema, the most beautiful I have ever known, modeled on a Venetian Palace" - and who now lives in San Francisco, is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the London Independent, and has written biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, as well as two novels, Suspects and Silver Light, both based on the movies. He is in a long line of intellectuals to have fallen into a trance before the silver, and Technicolored, screen - such as Graham Greene and, latterly, the New Yorker's Anthony Lane - and is a sumptuous prose stylist and master of the short feature. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film is a delight throughout, fascinating, informative, ravishingly written, the ultimate desert-island book, and more, much more.
It is hard to know how best to read it. One could begin at the beginning, with a masterly page and a half on Abbott and Costello - "Lou is the one who has blood pressure, and Bud hasn't" - and sit steadily through nearly a thousand pages of pleasure until reaching Terry Zwigoff - "reclusive, not much short of depressive, and possibly \ most self-deprecating filmmaker this author has met" - or just take the thing off into a corner like Little Jack Horner and keep a thumb busy for three or four plum-happy weeks.
And what plump plums there are. Let us take an example pretty much at random. Here he is on Charlie Chaplin:"The delicacy of Chaplin's own features, the Italianate daintiness of his gestures, and above all, the mooning after misty emotional contentment are feminine characteristics as conceived by an exquisite man."
Again:"Was Chaplin's common man so far from Hitler? He spoke to disappointment, brutalised feelings and failure and saw that through movies he could concoct a daydream world in which the tramp thrives and in which his whole ethos of self-pity is vindicated."
Again: "In truth, Chaplin is the looming mad politician of the century, the demon tramp. It is a character based on the belief that there are 'little people'. Whereas art should insist that people are all the same size."
Thomson's insistence on the essentially democratic nature of film is strongly in evidence in every entry, but especially in his acid scepticism toward the haughty auteurs of the post-studios era. The judgment he delivers on Stanley Kubrick, for instance, is particularly withering. This boy from the Bronx who ended up a sulky recluse on his estate in Buckinghamshire held mesmeric sway over the big Hollywood companies from the early 1960s right up to the end of the century, so much so that he was allowed, at stupendous cost, to indulge in the doomed attempt to recreate Vietnam on a film lot in leafy England for the ineffably bad Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick's interesting but empty last movie, Eyes Wide Shut (1999) - the screenwriter, Frederick Raphael, has wisely made it known that the silly title was not his, but the director's - is a perfect example of Kubrick's style, which Thomson considers "meretricious, fussy and detachable". It is the detachability that Thomson most reprehends. He points out that even though Hitchcock - has anyone every remarked the peculiar aptness of that surname? - was a chilling man, "his style fitted him perfectly", while all Kubrick had was "cold, humorless authority".
Writing about A Clockwork Orange, Thomson is unforgiving: "Kubrick signaled his own gravity with years of preparation, endless painstaking in shooting, the courting of serious topics, and pandering to the audience's appetite for sensation and vulgarity in the guise of importance". These are serious charges against a filmmaker deeply admired by other critics, and a high earner at the box-office as well. Thomson, however, is adamant. Kubrick, he contends, paid too much heed to the technicalities of film and not half enough to character or narrative. "The point is crucial: cinematic inventiveness must grow out of an attitude to people, and in the form of a preoccupation with the medium." The human is the one essential element of the movies, for the lack of which no amount of wide-angle overviews or incongruously placed Strauss waltzes will compensate.
As must be clear by now, Thomson is no respecter of reputations. He tramples elegantly upon many an accepted master at whose feet one would have expected him to bow low. He is cool on Billy Wilder - "Witness for the Prosecution is among the crassest offences ever given to innocent celluloid" - has reservations on Fellini - "the question must be asked whether his films have made a sham of vitality in the process of smothering life with affectionate but self-indulgent egotism" - and is positively contemptuous of John Ford, "so often bigoted, grandiloquent and maudlin".
Ford's male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity and the elevation of random prejudices into a near-political attitude. Thus Ford's pioneers talk of enterprise but show narrowness and reaction. Above all, his characters are accepted on their own terms - the hope of every drunk - and never viewed critically.
This review has concentrated perhaps overmuch on the negative aspects of Thomson's criticism. He is a great celebrator - Irish readers will be charmed by the Dictionary entry on his friend, the late Kieran Hickey - helplessly in love with a medium which mostly delights him but which all too often falls short of his perhaps inappropriately high hopes. On the soundtrack of this book, there is detectable a background buzz of lamentation. Why, the author constantly seems to ask, does this marvellous art form, the most enchanting, voluptuous, and certainly the most popular ever to have been devised by human ingenuity, why must it go on producing so much that is tawdry, exploitative, and just plain awful?
Yet, in the end, after the credits have rolled and those plush Venetian curtain have hissingly closed, he forgives the cinema even its excesses. His epigraph, from Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, is at once a sly defence and a defiant vindication:
WHEELER: A game-legged old man and a drunk - that's all you've got?
CHANCE: That's what I've got.
John Banville's most recent novel, Shroud, is published by Picador. His non-fiction book, Prague Pictures, part of The Writer and the City series published by Bloomsbury, will appear in September Film
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Fourth Edition By David Thomson Little Brown, 976pp, £25