The Big Screen - The Story Of The Movies And What They Did to Us by David Thomson

A very welcome Christmas present that I have been steadily been working my way through. It is a huge analysis of the history of film and I cannot pretend I read every page. Some of the foreign studies are just too much even for a film buff like me. However at the start of PART I: THE SHINING LIGHT AND THE HUDDLED MASSES there are some very interesting passages about early movies. These included silent films like The Birth of a Nation" directed in 1915 by David Wark Griffith, the 1929 Pandora's Box directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and starring Louise Brooks. The part about Hollywood in the 30's is superb.

As I said, the chapters about foreign films didn't interest me that much, although the passages about French directors from the Lumiere brothers Louis and Auguste, through Jean Renoir (La Regle de Jeu) and Luis Bunuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) were quite important. But I was totally engrossed by the history of early British film. From Michael Powell to Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean.

When we get to PART II: SUNSET AND CHANGE, I began to lose interest. A somewhat intellectual thesis on post war American film and the advent of television was not what I was looking for.

But PART III's FILM STUDIES was exceptional. We are in the early sixties and the movies that still resonant with me today. The combination of Joseph Losey, Harold Pinter and Dirk Bogarde made The Servant so superior, followed closely by Victim, Accident, and The Night Porter. The book enthuses about a string of British classics: Look Back In Anger, The Entertainer, A Taste Of Honey, The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, Tom Jones, A Kind Of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling, This Sporting Life, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning and Blow Up. There is a great piece about The Godfather. Thomson describes this as "the outstanding modern American film". But Francis Ford Coppola only won an Oscar for Part II. 

This book is probably the first in depth analysis of the history of the movies that I have read. So it is impossible to compare it with any others. David Thomson has done an extraordinary job with such a huge subject. I guess it will now be a standard text for many school or university courses about film. For me, it was a book to dip into over a few months. In future it will be an invaluable reference when I want to find a particular movie. So it will never be far away.