David Thomson is, without doubt, the greatest living film historian, archivist and professional fan, as any reader of "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" will surely agree. Whether Thomson is also a great critic is not so clear.
" 'Have You Seen . . . ?' A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films" is Thomson's latest contribution to an oeuvre that includes biographies of Orson Welles ("Rosebud"), David O. Selznick ("Showman") and Marlon Brando; a highly entertaining novel ("Silver Light") that mingles the lives of real people in the Old West with characters in movie westerns; several manifestations of his film dictionary; and a recent mash note to Nicole Kidman. "Have You Seen . . . ?" is, he writes in his introduction, "a 'bumper' book for your laps, a volume where you could keep turning the pages and coming upon juxtapositions of the fanciful and the fabulous."
Going for a thousand, Thomson says, is "a gesture towards history -- it seems to require that the selector weigh the old against the new. It's like wondering whether Beowulf can talk to Lolita." The result requires that a diligent reader wade through more than half a million words.
I take no pride in admitting that "Have You Seen . . . ?" defeated me. Even though I share many, if not most, of Thomson's tastes and agree with most of his judgments, I just don't think I'm ever going to return to "Have You Seen . . . ?" for his thoughts on "The Sound of Music," "Going My Way," "Ben-Hur," "Portrait of Jenny," "The Firm," "The Dirty Dozen" and perhaps a hundred other films that I don't care about.
Why, a film fan wonders, has this book been padded so obscenely with remarks on movies that aficionados, Thomson among them, care little or nothing about? In the entry on "The Sound of Music," which I read only to see why he wrote about it, Thomson claims that it "has to be in the book if only because millions of the stupid and aggrieved will write in to the publisher, 'Where was "The Sound of Music"?' if it is not [included]." Clearly Thomson is being facetious, but in the absence of any real answer for including reviews of unwatchable films, the obvious one must suffice: He's out to score points shooting at easy targets. For instance, "The Dirty Dozen" (OK, I read that one too) is "slovenly and second-rate, devoid of cinematic interest or tension." Correct, but who could miss a target that broad?
