The big picture

David Thomson’s title is, slightly, a misnomer. A dictionary is generally a compendium of useful information objectively presented. You do not expect to find in such a volume, even one devoted to so raffish a subject as the movies, something like this definition of Sir Charles Chaplin: “the looming mad politician of the century, the demon tramp.” Or this dismissal of John Ford: “No one has done so much to invalidate the Western as a form.” Or this description of Tom Hanks: “ ... [H]e carries the automatic sentiment of a dog in a film about people.”

Is this any way to run a reference book? Possibly not. I disagree with the easy harshness of these judgments (and with the substance of at least two of them). I would be happier -- truth in advertising and all that -- if Thomson had worked some warning word (“critical” is the one that comes most readily to mind) into the title of this, the fourth edition of his massive, invaluable attempt to comprehend and compress more than 100 years of movie history into a single volume.

On the other hand, he more or less cheerfully admits to the messy rigors of the one-man encyclopedist’s life: “The desk, the floor, the rooms that have made this book are a sea of untidiness on which the author makes a Columbus-like assertion of knowing where everything is. Of course, he does not. Notes, reports, articles, pictures ebb and flow....” A man so inundated is, I think, more than entitled to his unseemly assertions, his yowls of impatience with the dry conventional wisdom, the unexamined pieties, that so often attend his subject.

To some degree, the sheer vastness of Thomson’s enterprise renders it inarguable. By this I mean that its 1,300 entries, many of them essays thousands of words long, will sooner or later dizzy and overwhelm anyone who attempts systematically to read it. Who are we to argue with the huge range of facts he has scooped up off all those flat surfaces, especially when they are so efficiently marshaled to his uses? More to the point, how can we dispute the apparent thoroughness of his viewing?

I have, for example, been a professional movie reviewer for some 35 years and, in one of my other lives, a fairly serious film historian, someone who never writes about a film figure without seeing all his available works. But there are many directors (Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Rivette, Yasujiro Ozu, to name three pretty much at random) about whom he writes with all-knowing authority but whose work, frankly, I do not know well enough to argue over with him. If that’s true of me -- like Thomson, serving a life sentence without hope of parole at the cineplex -- how much more true it must be of the casual filmgoer, looking up someone whose work caught his eye one night on television. To put the point simply, the massiveness of his erudition and the brisk confidence of his manner -- he’s an awfully good writer -- render Thomson something of a dangerous character.

He does make mistakes. Some of them are minor -- the character Mia Farrow played in “The Purple Rose of Cairo” was a hash-house waitress, not an usherette. Some of them are the result of careless updating of previous editions: Richard Attenborough is now approaching 80, not 70, as Thomson would have it, and a certain number of careers, alas, now must be written about in the past rather than the present tense. There are also times when some of his entries just peter out into a list of unconsidered titles.

All of this is forgivable. And easily correctable. But there are lapses that are harder to set aside. For example, Stanley Kubrick. Thomson seems to understand “The Shining” quite precisely for what it is: an effort to convey dread wordlessly, through the imagery of emptiness, which was not so much a symbol of its blocked-writer protagonist’s emptiness but its mad extension into his environment. How is it, then, that he cannot see that a similar silence (about a different kind of dread, of course) is going on in the equally fine “Barry Lyndon”? Or that the nonsensical verbosity of “Dr. Strangelove” (which, in my opinion, is the most perfect of all postwar comedies) also amounts to a kind of existential silence?

Well, all right, Kubrick is always my test case for cinephiles. He is much more beloved and appreciated by filmmakers than by film critics, because he alone of the great moderns was trying to make films that told their stories imagistically rather than verbally, which is what all serious directors want to do. It upsets me that someone as smart as Thomson can’t see that. It upsets me, too, to find him charging John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate” with a “real neglect of Americana.” Didn’t he notice that when the liberal senator is shot he is holding a milk carton to his chest and that he seems to bleed the milk of human kindness? I don’t know how much more dangerously, poignantly “American” an image can be.

There is, in short, sometimes a glibness in Thomson, based surely on the fact that he cannot possibly find the time to reconsider films glimpsed long ago and erroneously deconstructed by ever-fallible memory. And also, perhaps in a desire to show off, to skip controversially against the populist tide. For example, he finds himself “skeptical” of Paul Newman’s “blue-eyed likability,” finding instead “an uneasy, self-regarding personality” whose “smirking good humor always seemed more appropriate to glossy advertisements than to good movies.” Ouch.

But then something of Thomson’s generally more generous spirit kicks in. He finds in “The Verdict” that “the action and Boston’s winter light got through the mask and into a raw soul” and something “more relaxed, grumpier, and truly likable” in the work of Newman’s later years. There is, in passages like this, an implicit acknowledgment of the movie love he sometimes unpersuasively tries to deny that must animate anyone undertaking a task as all-consuming as Thomson’s.

The trouble with writing movie history is that eventually everyone begins to believe his or her own press releases. They get lost in their own imagery and the rest of us tend heedlessly to follow them into the swamp of self-regard and, occasionally, self-destruction. Thomson’s need -- his glory -- is to look at everything anew, to test our automatic assumptions, our hardened, habitual affections, to suggest the possibility of alternative readings, but finally -- well, yes, “grumpily” -- to acknowledge that most of the lives he parses have not been entirely wasted.

Considering Vincente Minnelli, he writes: “When credits seemed to a boy a protracted teasing of proper expectations, it dawned slowly that certain names went with certain pleasures. Those recurring names were the basis of an approach to art: George Cukor, Anthony Mann, Howard Hawks and -- the most flamboyant -- Vincente Minnelli.” He may have moved on, patient and alert, to the more austere pleasures of Ozu and his ilk, but, blessedly, his book also contains brief, deft appreciations not merely of such generally acknowledged masters of the B picture as Budd Boetticher but also of his more obscure peers, Jack Arnold and Joseph H. Lewis.

Movies are an art of many mansions. And a book like Thomson’s would be impossible without acknowledgment of that inconvenient fact. Childlike wonder -- the refusal to confront movies as occasionally some kind of art for adults -- has been responsible for a lot of stupid writing about movies. On the other hand, forgetting that little kid squirming with delight before a giddy Hawks comedy or an awesome musical invention by Minnelli is also a disaster. Movies are a medium for double-trackers, willing accomplices in their own seduction who can yet, when the lights come back on, criticize the means by which they have been had. And imagine better ways of doing the job.

No one is better at this “yes, but ... “ manner than Thomson. Earlier editions of his “Dictionary” have been my constant companions for decades, consulted almost weekly, not so much to check facts but to test sensibility. I happily welcome this latest revision -- this looming, surely half-mad enterprise, this demon of defining -- to their place. May our quarrels never end. And, incidentally, may Richard Dix, George Brent and Warner Baxter never disappear from Thomson’s pages. They may no longer linger in living memory, but they are part of the history his book artfully defines and defends in Alzheimer’s Age.