I feel terribly fortunate that I lived through an age when there was enormous appreciation and rediscovery of classic cinema allied to the breaking of so many new waves on the shore.
Author wonders if many of yesterday's great films would be made today
A Light in the Dark:
A History of Movie Directors
David Thomson Knopf
Film historian David Thomson is unequivocal in his judgment: Luis Buñuel's 1967 movie Belle de Jour is “one of the very few great films.”
Yet Thomson seriously wonders whether it could be made today, given that the legendary Catherine Deneuve was portraying a seemingly proper Paris housewife who indulges in lurid masochistic fantasies and secretly works in a brothel a couple of afternoons a week.
“It has several degrees of sexual candour and in particular damage to a woman,” Thomson tells Postmedia. “I don't think you could get away with it now.”
So his latest book, A Light in the Dark, poses a provocative question: “Is this a masterpiece or something that should not be allowed?” He's writing about a classic film whose content, taken out of context, would surely provoke “howls of outrage” from the #Metoo generation. “The film won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1967,” he says, “but now ...”
The new volume is subtitled A History of Movie Directors — and the controversial Buñuel is one of several filmmakers explored in depth by an author whose most celebrated work, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, is one cinephiles treasure. But here, Thomson's reverence for the great filmmakers of the past is tempered by an awareness of the precarious status of classic works of cinema in today's society.
This concern extends to some of the most fabled movies in popular culture.
A key example: Hollywood's Howard Hawks, another famous director Thomson reveres, citing 1944's To Have and Have Not, in which a sultry Lauren Bacall tells Humphrey Bogart how to whistle, and 1946's The Big Sleep, bristling with sexual double entendres. Thomson calls the films “flat-out masterpieces” before glumly adding that “I don't think anyone in America could make those films today. The daring and the innuendo — I don't think you could get away with that now.”
He's quick to admit that the history of film poses “troubling ” challenges. “We're sort of disowning the Hollywood past — often with good reason,” he says, citing the racism inherent in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation as one notorious example.
“But I don't know what's going to replace it.”
And he's clearly unsettled by a Hollywood present inhabited by Quentin Tarantino, an audacious filmmaker who remains devoted to the idea of cinematic violence as some kind of spectator sport.
“I think his Pulp Fiction is an extraordinary film,” Thomson says. “But Reservoir Dogs I can't stand.” As for the gruesome, self-indulgent climax to Tarantino's latest, Once Upon a Time ... In Hollywood, Thomson has one word to describe it — “deplorable.”
Unlike Buñuel, an outraged and outrageous moralist ready at every turn to dynamite bourgeois values through his brilliantly crafted films, the middle-aged Tarantino remains locked in his own adolescent dream world. “A lot of kids yearn to grow up — that's the beginning of the process of life,” Thomson says. “I don't feel that in him. I think he's almost determined to stay a kid.”
Tarantino, 58, represents a significant figure in today's cinema, so that's why he gets a chapter to himself along with genuine filmmaking heavyweights including Buñuel, Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Hawks, Orson Welles, Stephen Frears, Nicholas Ray and Martin Scorsese. Thomson's homages to them are perceptive, engaging and refreshingly clear-sighted.
Scorsese, whose achievements range from Taxi Driver and Raging Bull to the recent The Irishman, is a case in point.
“I admire him enormously, but I think he's made some bad films ... and I think he knows it,” Thomson says. “I'm more interested in artists like that because they will take exceptional risks. I personally feel drawn to that kind of director.”
And the collapse of greatness does interest him, no more so than in the case of Welles, who made Citizen Kane at the age of 25 and then had nowhere to go but down.
“I think Welles had a deeply depressed, self-destructive streak in him,” says Thomson, himself one of the Boy Wonder's many driven biographers. “I always marvel at the way people watch Kane and talk endlessly about its innovations. They never talk about how sad a film it is. To me, it's the sadness in Welles that ultimately makes him so lastingly intriguing a figure.” Then there's the underrated Ray. “He loved people in a sort of reckless and untidy way and that accounted for all the disasters in his life,” Thomson says.
Ray is now remembered mainly for directing James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, a seminal 1955 film with a problematic history. The scenes involving Dean, Natalie Wood and the young Sal Mineo have an erotic undercurrent that is not entirely heterosexual. During filming, the womanizing Ray had an affair with the underage Wood, just 16 at the time, who was also sexually involved with another cast member, Dennis Hopper. “Such action today would shut a career down,” Thomson writes. “At the same time, Ray had some homosexual relationships. When he looks at Dean and Sal Mineo in the film, you cannot miss the yearning.”
So would Rebel still have achieved and retained its classic allure without the emotional and sexual ferment behind the camera?
“I first saw Rebel at a time when I was not much younger than Natalie Wood — and I felt that feeling of desire,” the 80-year-old Thomson remembers. “Although Rebel is now dated in lots of ways, when I go back to it, it's still there.”
There's an elegiac tone to A Light in the Dark. Underlying its celebration of some of cinema's greatest directors, there's apprehension about an art form entering uncharted waters. Indeed, Thomson also suspects that film is in a state of decline as a mass medium.
“I'm sure that when we get out of the pandemic, there will be a return to theatres, but I'm not sure it will be lasting. I think that what COVID has done is make us more comfortable watching films in our living room — many of them longform television series that I think are often more challenging and interesting than the movies we have been seeing.”
But Thomson, whose worship of film began when he was a youngster growing up in England, remains grateful for the life it has given him.
“I'm an old man, but still feel young,” he says. “And I feel terribly fortunate that I lived through an age when there was enormous appreciation and rediscovery of classic cinema allied to the breaking of so many new waves on the shore. And then so much was happening in the 1960s and 1970s that was so exciting. I felt I was exactly the right age for it. I don't think it's the same now.”