A LIGHT IN THE DARK

A prolific film critic offers analyses of noteworthy directors.

Despite the subtitle, Thomson presents a series of personal assessments of a handful of filmmakers. “I have omitted so many people,” he admits. Indeed, there are chapters on Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles but not Sergei Eisenstein, Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, and many others. Much of this material appears in greater detail in other, better books, including some of Thomson’s own works. A typically florid sentence is the author’s appraisal of Hitchcock: “A time may come when he stands for Movies in the way Attila the Hun bestrides the Dark Ages or Cleopatra signifies Ancient Egypt.” Thomson’s opinions are often based on debatable logic. He notes with sadness that Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game has fallen behind Vertigo in greatest-films surveys, but even readers who agree that Vertigo is the lesser film might be baffled by the author’s claim that its triumph over Renoir’s indictment of maladjusted sophisticates represents “opting for neurosis over reason.” Curiously for such an acclaimed film critic, Thomson gets facts wrong. For example, he claims The Piano wasn’t nominated for Best Picture the year Driving Miss Daisy won. The Piano came out four years after Daisy, and it was nominated but lost to Schindler’s List. While the author makes some progressive statements—e.g., that the film industry needs more respect for women—he undercuts them with tin-eared comments, such as when noting the camera’s infatuation with Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour: “I have a similar wish to dwell on the smoothness of Deneuve’s skin.” Only one chapter focuses on women directors. But at least the book has some memorable lines: “There are instants in Pierrot le Fou where its grasp of love and love’s death are like hummingbirds on your veranda, while Doctor Zhivago is a pantechnicon struggling up a distant hill with a grand piano to be carried up the stairs.”

A well-meaning but flawed book about legendary filmmakers.