I should start by saying that all of David Thomson's books I have read so far were first class. The Big Screen (post 9th October 2014), A Light in the Dark - A History of Movie Directors (post 8th March 2021), Moments That Made Movies (post 19th August 2022) and How to Watch a Movie (post 22nd March 2023. I also have his reference books Have You Seen .... and The Biographical Dictionary of Film. So I was looking forward to this new volume about Hollywood. However, I found it all a bit of a mess. There seemed very little structure and lots of repetition. So something of a slog through this long book. Someone said it was "droningly dictatorial". It does ramble on. However, there are gems along the way that made it worth while. I made some notes on each of the 22 chapters so I had better put these into some sort of order.
The Gamble and the Lost Rights
How wonderful it starts with a friend. Robert Towne, a screenwriter and Oscar winner for Chinatown. Not that well paid until he assisted with the Mission Impossible franchise. We do get a decent history of the making of Chinatown especially the relationship between Towne and director Roman Polanski who changed the ending and made it so awful. The bad guy survives. But the sequel The Two Jakes was "a turkey". But somehow the book often harks back to the things in this chapter. Why?
Mayer and Thalberg
Some stuff about the heads of studios - David O. Selznick, Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer. Thomson obviously admires Thalberg but despises Mayer; "greedy and cruel" with starlets visiting his office.
The Place
That must be Los Angeles. "The light is brighter than elsewhere - you can measure it on a light meter". "There is a glamour, a life enhancement, a romance in American cinematography that you do not find in other countries". A bit about the growth in the population of LA from 150,000 in 1890 that exploded to a million in1915 to the 8 million of today. The supply of water was always a problem, the risk of earthquakes, but the light!
To be in an Audience
Thomson quotes from the stirring ending of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. "So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past". The title refers to that shared experience in a cinema, "there is no stopping or repeating" ( had to go and see Inception and Oppenheimer twice to understand something that I missed) and that it is "fundamental to the beauty and art of what we call a movie".
Charlie
An important section, but not for me. Mentions, of course, for The Gold Rush 1925, The Circus 1928 and City Lights 1931, the "pinnacle" of his career.
By a Nose
Why does a History of Hollywood have a chapter about Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours? Thomson tells us all about the voice, the make-up and deportment that made her unrecognisable. The author is obviously a huge fan of Nicole, but why a whole chapter in this sort of book? OK, there were deservedly lost of Oscar nominations and wins. And a cast to die for including Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore, class direction from Stephen Daldry and the screenplay by David Hare from the Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Cunningham. Thomson notes how rare on film is someone who commits themselves to a role like this. "I still like The Hours, I was moved by it". Then "there isn't a sight in movies as momentous as shots of a face as it's mind is being changed". "And only movies have allowed that". It's a superb piece by the author, but why here in this book?
The Man in the Hat ...... The Woman in Gloves
Oh dear, now we jump back, way back to D W Griffiths and early film. After several hundred shorts, here comes The Birth of a Nation in 1915 and Intolerance the following year. The author tells us "my task .... (it is the passion of the equation) is to convince you that the two are one: that the urge to tell these stories is inseparable from the wish to make money". The book is littered with these scattershot ideas.
Stroheim and Seeing Money
"Anyone in film, or into it, has grown up with the legend of Stroheim". I did not have a clue, David. The movie Greed from 1925 is forty reels long. Thomson says it's "one of the most important achievements in silent film". But nine hours? A long and tedious biography of the film maker.
The Frenzy on the Wall
Here is the author living in Streatham as a child, the late 40's, the cinemas there. Should this not have started the book and why here? Lots of box office statistics, all boring.
Respect
All about Louis B. Mayer (again!) of MGM, the highest paid man in America. Who are the MPPDA (now the MPAA)? Mayer was at the helm (and chairman) of of the newly formed International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The birth of the Oscars.
At the Paradise
Somehow an Edward Hopper painting from 1929 leads us into the advent of sound in pictures. Not an easy birth.
The Factory
Thomson asks us "What is Art" and then goes into an interminable explanation. He calls the studios "the factory" and dwells on what it takes to make a film. Somehow we are on to the films of King Vidor (as I said it's all over the place) especially the very successful The Big Parade. Then on to War and Peace from 1956 and Duel in the Sun from 1946. When he talks about financing pictures, we are on to Greta Garbo and James Cagney. He compares Gone with the Wind (the all time success) with the box office failure that was Jean Renoir's La Regle de Jeu. But then how the latter was a "landmark and a masterpiece). When Thomson slags off films of today at the end of this section, is he just being stupidly controversial for the sake of it?
Viable Business
Going back in time, he tells us how many films a star had to make in a year. James Cagney made thirty two in ten years. Including playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (highly exceptional). Thomson notes "the manner in which the screenplay itself became a managerial tool, a set of plans, insurance that the system would be upheld". What does this all mean? He rambles on "The script in Hollywood is now regarded as a sacred thing; time and again the emptiness of modern movies is blamed on bad scripts, and with ample reason". I could not believe what I was reading. Then more boring stuff about Hollywood producers again, and then the unions (the Writer's Guild the most protected union ever). "They are technicians rather than authors" because their work is never theirs. And do not get me started about his views on agents!
Golden?
Now we know Thomson's golden age of film. The 1930's and 40's. There is too much about It's a Wonderful Life and how it lost out to The Best Years of Our Lives at the Oscars. But then a nice piece about Preston Sturges, initially a writer, he thought he could direct his own scripts. And did so very successfully. Until a sad ending to his career. After a highly successful period with Paramount, he refused to accept their new contract, and ended in failure. More like this please.
Divorce, Hollywood Style
Who could be interested in all of this? Not me. A lot about David Selznick again. He almost has a whole column in the Index at the end. Why not put everything about him in one place rather than dozens of different pages all through the book? I was not interested in his private life. Sorry.
Our Town
Of course that's LA. A potted history but then an extraordinary couple of pages Harlem Carpenter or Jean Harlow as we know her. "America's slut". She married Paul Bern who is found dead, naked in his dressing room. A big scandal but Harlow went on to make many more films, forty two in all before she died at twenty six. Compared to Katherine Hepburn - "a model of feminist independence".
The Darkness and the Light
After the war, the dark inside a cinema was an alternative to the daylight outside, so was "the bet place to be". Interesting about the dark films of the post war period 1945-1949. So "where did noir come from. An intriguing question and one not adequately answered". Thomson mentions Crossfire, The Killers, Double Indemnity and others. A dozen pages at the end covers the late forties in style.
In a Lonely Place
Thomson describes the title as "I am thinking about a kind of alienation that begins within the film business itself, and in it's relation to America". It "is elusive" to say the least. "The loneliness is actual, you can feel it in LA". We are in the early fifties and soon we are on to The House Committee For Un-American Activities and The Blacklist. Not forgetting unions, gangsters and strikes. Or The Committee For The First Amendment. A collection of top movie people including John Huston, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart among others. Arguing about the "unfriendly hearings". Joseph Losey leaves America when his communist background rears it's head, and in the UK makes The Criminal, The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between. All brilliant movies (that's me). Other films in this period discussed are Crossfire, Force of Evil, The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra (those last three with Bogart).
"What is Cinema?"
This part all starts with RKO. Not the biggest studio but one that produced some outstanding movies. But they dumped Lucille Ball thinking she had no future in film. She had previously met Desi Arnaz and they formed the company Desilu. They paid for a pilot of a comedy called I Love Lucy and sold it to CBS for not much. It became the nation's number one TV show and by 1953 had a revenue of Six Million Dollars. In 1967 Gulf and Weston bought Desilu for Seventeen Million Dollars. This was just to show how TV was taking over from cinema. But films fight back with Cinemascope and the biggest screens showing The King and I, Carousel, South Pacific, The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Show on Earth (one of my early movies), and Ben-Hur. We then get a list of all the stars who really wanted to work in films and not TV including Cary Grant and Grace Kelly (To Catch a Thief). Then more about Hitchcock and Billy Wilder and their successes. When the author goes on to some film history, we hear that it is the French who take the work of American directors far more seriously than their homeland, and find themselves as "Auteurs". The first ever book on Hitchcock was by Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer!
A Film We Can't Refuse
Into 1960 and Cleopatra. And other big blockbusters of the sixties. And how the movies were sold off to TV. Then all those films of the 60's and early 70's such as The Godfather,
Right Before Your Eyes
Oh No! He starts with The Matrix and then something about horror films. It's just turning into a list of movies, has he got bored with the book, or as he previously remarked, the only good films are those from way back. we do get some insight into the making of Heaven's Gate. but we have heard all that before. But there does seem to be an interesting book called "Final Cut: Art Money and EGO in the making of Heavens Gate, the film that sank United Artists" by Steven Bach.
That's All Folks?
To finish we get lots of facts, lots of numbers (for example cinema chains going bust) and some stuff on independent films. Thomson glosses over Miramax. He says later "I regret the way that America has elected to make films for it's bluntest section of society (yes, he actually says this) and in ways that flatter them". And there is "much evidence that digital images will not last" ... "there is a deadness in digital" ... "they abandon the one essential: reliance on light". Then "I am alarmed and mystified by the way film still photography have so fallen in love with digital imagery". His "last story" makes him out to be a bitter old man, which I'm sure he is not.
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