The Reel Thing

The underrated, ravishing Heaven's Gate (Image credit: The Kobal Collection)

Thomson tries to set things right. He deflates undeserved reputations: The Graduate, “said to be one of everybody’s favorites!,” is “cold, heartless entertainment, never more ruthless than when dumping charm on us”; Lawrence of Arabia “is spectacular enough to pass for a thinking man’s epic (without the thought).” And he champions the overlooked (John Huston’s Fat City, Ida Lupino in The Hard Way). In his characteristically discursive manner, he builds his arguments over several entries. Jeff Bridges, thanks to his control and wounded grace (in Fat City, Heaven’s Gate, Cutter and Bone, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Big Lebowski), emerges convincingly as “the essential ... actor of modern American cinema”; Michael Curtiz’s “blithe lack of self-regard” in his direction of The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Yankee Doodle Dandy makes him “not merely lightly likeable [take that, Andrew Sarris] but a genius.” Thomson recognizes “the wit, the precision, the timing, the class” of What’s Up, Doc? And he isn’t taken in, not for a second, by that other attempt to modernize the romantic comedy, the jejune When Harry Met Sally.

Alas, when it comes to the movies he loves most, Thomson pretty much throws up his hands, having written and talked about them for decades: Trouble in Paradise, TheRules of the Game (“the greatest film by the greatest director”), Les Enfants du Paradis (“the warmth and kindness of the film is not easily separated from the fluency of its style”), Swing Time (he knows enough to give Arlene Croce the last word on this picture), all the films of Preston Sturges (“the man you must come to love if this book will mean anything to you”), Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday (“we are talking about a picture that received not a single Academy nomination, and we are talking about one of the glories of American film”), To Be or Not to Be, Meet Me in St. Louis (a movie set in 1903 that captures perfectly the achiness of the Second World War home front), Double Indemnity (“Fred MacMurray simply looks a better and better actor as the years pass”—yes!), Red River (“my favorite picture”), Celine and Julie Go Boating (“I don’t think there has ever been a portrait so fond, so oblique, so touching, or so funny of what happens to us at the movies”), The Godfather, Chinatown.

The hard, lyrical Red River (Image credit: United Artists)

Thomson is most penetrating when he develops and enlarges his ideas and arguments over multiple entries, and when he’s neither praising nor slamming but simultaneously giving and taking away: see his ambivalent analyses of Do the Right Thing; Tinker, Tailor; the often magnificent Heaven’s Gate, the photography of which is exactly “heartbreaking”; and The Sopranos—expertly done, but “The Godfather plays every year; The Sopranos in reruns will bore you.”

It’s impossible to read this book from cover to cover without being convinced that Hollywood’s greatest achievements are not the monotonously important dramas that so often sucker in Academy voters but the stylish, highly polished entertainments, largely comedies, that endure even though they weren’t made to be lasting. Above all, Thomson prizes wit, charm, and good-natured ease. He’s reached an age, he notes in his appraisal of North by Northwest, when he’d “rather have a great screwball comedy than a profound tragedy. After all, tragedy is all around us and screwball is something only the movies can do.”

Thomson has never been backward-looking—he’s remarkably open and generous to contemporary talent, and has been particularly astute if exasperatingly partisan in his assessments of our current actors (witness his mad crush on Nicole Kidman). But this is an elegiac work. Even while his fine eye picks up the subtle, brilliant costuming in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and even while he neatly dissects the rigor and wit of The Queen (2006) and praises mightily Magnolia (a 1999 film that has grown even more in his estimation since the most recent edition of the Dictionary) and You the Living (2007), the evidence is in the reader’s hands:

If you were to make a graph of when the films in this book were made, there is a great hump that stands for the thirties, the forties, the fifties. I can try to moderate it, but I do not apologize for it.

He understands that the critical task is essentially comparative, and he acknowledges that Have You Seen …?” in effect “weighs the old against the new.” The result, he fears, is that “this book may come off as helplessly nostalgic.”

Of course it does. It’s nostalgic for a time when the movies were “everyone’s sport,” and their largest audience—and those who determined what picture to see—were women, not teenage boys. “I would suggest,” Thomson wrote in The Whole Equation, “that any potential reawakening of American film as a mainstream current may turn on how far the country can ever admit its feminine side.” It’s nostalgic for a time when the West had something close to a mass art form, albeit one defined by a mixture of aspiration, failed effort, and compromise. It’s nostalgic, that is, for a time far, far away, a time before Star Wars—“the line in the sand, the disastrous event,” as Thomson rightly says, unconsciously echoing Kael—turned American cinema into an adjunct to the video-game industry. (The annual turnover for video games dwarfs domestic theatrical-box-office and DVD revenue.) This is the complex story of a far-reaching commercial and cultural change, one Thomson has already chronicled in The Whole Equation. So why bother to ask, as he does here, “Is it possible that the movies are going to end up as museum pieces?” They already have.